Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Netflix the New Netzero

I remember when Netzero had the ad campaign, "We will always be free."  Shortly after that they cut their free users down to 40 hours a month and shortly after that they cut them back to 10 hours a month.  I left them shortly after that, so I have no idea if they still have any level of free at all.

The news that is circulating about Netflix is starting to smack of that sort of business moves.  They have marketing their product as unlimited for a monthly fee.  Netflix seems to keep shifting what unlimited means.  First it was DVDs and streaming together.  Stream as much as you want and cue up as many disks as you want.

Next they separated DVD service from streaming.  Now they are starting this new company called Qwikster to do the DVD portion of the business.

I have anticipated for a while that they would raise the prices after they crushed video stores enough, but I now wonder with all this gyrating, if they won't shortly cut the unlimited and end up with just renting one movie like with Walmart's and Amazon's streaming services.

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