Hacking NetFlix

New Netflix Streaming Releases This Week

Here's a list of notable new streaming releases in the past week: True Grit (original), True Grit (Jeff Bridges), Seth MacFarlane: Swingin' in Concert, Certified Copy, Love Crime, The Time That Remains, Tuesday, After Christmas, Lebanon, PA., Mao's Last Dancer, Jingle All the Way, Mars, Worth Winning, 11/11/11, Trespass, and Bunraku.

What are you streaming this weekend?

Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft Explains Innovation at Netflix

Adrian Cockcroft, Netflix's cloud architect, posted his notes from #defrag where he explains how Netflix gets out of the way of innovation. 

If you haven't experienced a high performance culture, think about what it's like to drive flat out at a race track. Some people will be too scared to deal with it and drive around white knuckled at 40 mph, some will be overconfident and crash on the first corner, but for people who fit into the high performance culture it's exhilarating to push yourself to go faster each lap, and learn from your peers without a speed limit. When you take out the BS and friction, everyone gets so much more done that productivity, innovation and rapid agile development just happen. This is the key message, removing obstacles to a high performance culture is how innovation happens throughout an organization. Doing less to get more.

Cockcroft explains the pay, bonus, stock, management structure, and vacation perks:

We don't pay bonuses. We don't have grades other than senior engineer, manager, director, VP. We don't count the hours or the vacation days, we say "take some". Once a year we revise everyones salary to their peers and current market rate - based on what we are paying now to hire the best people we can find.

The whole story is interesting, and he has some interesting streaming recommendations mixed in with the story.

U.S. Netflix Streaming Account Works in Canada

Reader Robert, who lives in the U.S., was traveling to Canada and found out that his Netflix streaming account now works in Canada. "Rather than getting the old "sorry, you are outside the US message", instead I got the entire Canadian catalogue of movies and could stream!"

It would be great if your Netflix streaming account worked anywhere you traveled.

Roger Ebert on Why Theater Revenue is Hurting

Roger Ebert explains why movie revenue is dropping, and includes the usual suspects: no major releases, prices, streaming, theater experience, etc. 

The myth that small-town moviegoers don't like "art movies" is undercut by Netflix's viewing results; the third most popular movie on Dec. 28 on Netflix was "Certified Copy," by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. You've heard of him? In fourth place--French director Alain Corneau's "Love Crime." In fifth, "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"--but the subtitled Swedish version.

The message I get is that Americans love the movies as much as ever. It's the theaters that are losing their charm. Proof: theaters thrive that police their audiences, show a variety of titles and emphasize value-added features. The rest of the industry can't depend forever on blockbusters to bail it out.

I really hate being stuck behind someone that can't stop texting every two minutes...

Notable Netflix Movies & TV Shows Expiring This Weekend

Unlike DVDs, Netflix streaming titles are licensed for a period of time, and titles come and go depending on the contract length (Netflix has described this as "ebb and flow" of titles). 

A number of interesting streaming titles are expiring this weekend: Amadeus, Ocean's Eleven, Serenity, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Scarface, The Blues Brothers, The Pledge, Space Cowboys, Natural Born Killers: Director's Cut, The Rookie, The Man Who Cried, Dog Day Afternoon, Analyze This, Analyze That, Insomnia, A Clockwork Orange, The Boxer, Blood Work, To Live and Die in L.A., The Hudsucker Proxy, Mad Max, Hearts in Atlantis, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Repo Man, Sweet November, and March of the Penguins.

You should check your streaming queue from time to time to see if titles are expiring, and two great sites for tracking upcoming and expiring titles are InstantWatcher and Feedfliks. 

Don't worry, Netflix has a bunch of new titles coming to replace the outgoing ones.

Netflix Drops in ForeSee E-Retail Satisfaction Index

Once at the top of the list for many years, a few misteps this year caused Netflix to drop in the ForeSee E-Retail Satisfaction Index. TechCrunch on the results:

Amazon climbed two points to score 88 on the study’s 100-point scale, which is the highest score from any retailer in 14 consecutive studies. Netflix’s well-publicized blunders, including price hikes last summer and the unsuccessful attempt to spin off the DVD rental business, caused its customer satisfaction to plummet by seven points and 8% to 79.

Netflix saw scores drop in every single element of the website that ForeSee measures, including site content, site functionality, merchandise, and prices. Next to Netflix, both Gap (down 6% to 73) and Overstock.com (down 5% to 72) saw the largest declines in satisfaction, leaving them with scores at the bottom of the Index.

What Complaints Do You Have about Netflix Streaming or DVD Rentals?

Palmer writes, "Where do I complain about the serious lack in Netflix service, obviously not from your slick and refined, oops I don't work for Netflix site, coulda fooled me ;-( So where on your site is there dissenting commentary or any commentary but numbing ads?"

Well, Palmer, here's an open story for anyone to air greivances about Netflix.

What's bugging you about Netflix streaming or DVD rentals?

NY Times Includes Reed Hastings in List of "Worst C.E.O.'s of 2011"

Sydney Findelstein, in "Another View" in the NY Times, put together a list of the worst CEO's of 2011 and included Netflix CEO Reed Hastings:

My final entry in the Worst C.E.O.’s of 2011 is Reed Hastings of Netflix. And if ever a chief executive found himself in the midst of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction, it is Mr. Hastings. New businesses destroy old ones, and in this way innovation and capitalism progress. Certainly that’s the story of the demise of Blockbuster at the hands of Netflix.

In 2011, Mr. Hastings took on the challenge directly by splitting Netflix into two parts, the original DVD mail-order business and the emerging online streaming business. Rather than ignore change, like the co-chiefs at RIM, Mr. Hastings wanted to increase the viability of the newer streaming business by removing it from the traditional business that it was meant to usurp. Unfortunately, he also decided to aggressively increase prices, complicate the customer experience and then partially backtrack on the whole thing when an onslaught of bad press ensued. In an instant, Netflix went from beloved icon of innovation to just another big, bad company ripping off customers, and the company’s stock is down almost 70 percent.

 

Netflix's CCO Ted Sarandos Recommends Documentaries

Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos posted a list of interesting documentaries to watch over the holidays.

I am a huge fan of documentary films and helping our subscribers get access to them even if they don’t live in the big cities is one of my favorite parts of this job. Our documentary selection is a point of great pride for me and my team. Documentary films play a very important role in a world where news is coming is shorter and shorter bites and the stories of our lives are becoming more and more complex. Documentarians entertain, inform and sometimes change the course of history. This year has been a great year for docs and some of the world’s best storytellers have brought their films to Netflix for streaming. It is hard to choose just a dozen of the best documentaries recently added, but I thought it might be a way to help you catch up over the long holiday break.

Here's his list of recommended documenataries: Senna, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Waiting for "Superman", Winnebago Man, Buck, The Arbor, The Last Mountain, Forks Over Knives, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Camp Victory, Afghanistan, and Storage Wars.

Netflix Customers Streaming Twice as Many Hours as Hulu Customers

TechCrunch cites comScore data that shows Netflix customers are streaming twice as many hours as Hulu customers:

Netflix and Hulu are the two leading video streaming services on the Web when it comes to mainstream TV shows and movies. More people watch Netflix online than Hulu, and have since about 18 months ago. In November, 2011, comScore estimates that Netflix.com attracted 26.6 million unique visitors, versus 20.2 million for Hulu

But a better metric to compare the two is how much time people actually spend at each site. And there Netflix trounces Hulu by two to one. U.S. visitors spent 1 billion minutes on Netflix.com in November, 2011, versus 480 million minutes on Hulu, according to comScore. (One caveat here is that people also go to Netflix.com to manage their DVD accounts and browse movie titles in addition to streaming videos, but the growth in time spent is most likely coming from streaming). Netflix has an edge over Hulu in that it streams more movies than TV shows, and those tend to be longer. But if that was the only factor, you’d expect to see the same ratio over time. Yet back in November, 2010, the two services were almost neck-and-neck in time spent, with Netflix users logging 750 million total minutes versus Hulu users logging 690 million.