Just To Annoy Farley

I will point out that this take on the extremely important Netflix issue is correct.

It’s pretty clear why Netflix customers were upset and puzzled about how the move even made business sense. Netflix was — wait, is again! — a combination of a first-rate DVD/Blu-Ray delivery service with reliable speedy delivery and a deep selection and a much more dubious streaming service with spotty, erratic selection and mediocre-to-abysmal quality. The value of the latter is, however, increased by having a unified queue — if they have streaming and the picture quality doesn’t matter, great, if not you can get it in the mail. (And the queue is real value. Admittedly, I’m a special case in that back a decade ago when I last lived in a city with a good video store, I would immediately forget every movie I wanted to see as soon as I walked in the door. But even with renting good movies a moot point being able to put something in the queue as soon as you think of it or hearing about it is a great feature, and having to split that up would be a pain in the ass.) The Qwixter spinoff made clear that they were going to let the first-rate delivery service degenerate, and without even the ability to use the First Sale doctrine-protected DVD service as leverage the streaming service was going to get worse rather than better. So, there’s very good reason why Netflix customers were pissed off by the dumb Qwikster split and will be happy that it’s been abandoned.