Oh, and about that Netflix thing
It's fucking stupid. There are a hundred and one reasons that this Qwikster thing is bad news, all of which other people have gone over in detail, and I won't repeat here. For me, it simply comes down to the power Netflix is pissing away in this move. Separating out their business, which I and others think is a sign they're looking to sell off the DVDs-by-mail business entirely, halves their subscriber base, thus giving them fewer voices with which they may shout at studios providing them content in order to get that content more cheaply. Worse, splitting the websites makes it hard for people to maintain their queues. People are fucking lazy. Netflix has heretofore made excuses for that laziness by making everything easier than ever (put it in your DVD queue, and bam! added to your instant queue, too! etc. etc.). Making it hard for anyone, much less people less tech-savvy than most of the people I know reading this is just stupid. They'll drop half your service. I already know one person who's doing just that. More will follow.
And even if you retain the supposed "wave of the future" customers who only want streaming (probably at least one of my siblings), they are called the customers of the future for a reason. They are not "the customers of now." Streaming may be the future, but it's not there yet. There are some big names conspicuously absent from Netflix's streaming library. Perhaps most notable? HBO. HBO will never give over its streaming access to Netflix. It has it's own streaming service, HBO Go, which is restricted only to people who subsribe to HBO. There's zero incentive, no matter the cost of maintaining that service, for them to drop it because maintenance must cost less than losing subcribers who are willing to wait until they can get Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, etc. on Netflix. HBO may be the only half-smart player in this; they probably took a hit when HBO was losing subscribers over Netflix DVDs-by-mail and weren't about to go through that twice. They've been incredibly smart, even, as I've noticed that their shows, while still expensive, are no longer outrageously priced to own on DVD. HBO's the model of the future, as moonlightalice has pointed out: streaming is most likely going to end up being doled out piecemeal among the different studios, who will be incredibly possessive of their content (having learned, much later than HBO, that it's better not to farm out your content to someone who'll make more distributing it than you'll get in fees).
But, yeah, I don't see Netflix as streaming-only being that great until you can break someone like HBO into giving over their content, and their ability to bully for less cost is going to be taken away by splitting up or spinning off their DVD division. That's economicsFAIL! right there. All other considerations--the fact some people can't stream, that some people like special features, that streaming is unrealiable and prone to last-second loss of content--come second to that, far as I'm concerned.
And even if you retain the supposed "wave of the future" customers who only want streaming (probably at least one of my siblings), they are called the customers of the future for a reason. They are not "the customers of now." Streaming may be the future, but it's not there yet. There are some big names conspicuously absent from Netflix's streaming library. Perhaps most notable? HBO. HBO will never give over its streaming access to Netflix. It has it's own streaming service, HBO Go, which is restricted only to people who subsribe to HBO. There's zero incentive, no matter the cost of maintaining that service, for them to drop it because maintenance must cost less than losing subcribers who are willing to wait until they can get Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, etc. on Netflix. HBO may be the only half-smart player in this; they probably took a hit when HBO was losing subscribers over Netflix DVDs-by-mail and weren't about to go through that twice. They've been incredibly smart, even, as I've noticed that their shows, while still expensive, are no longer outrageously priced to own on DVD. HBO's the model of the future, as moonlightalice has pointed out: streaming is most likely going to end up being doled out piecemeal among the different studios, who will be incredibly possessive of their content (having learned, much later than HBO, that it's better not to farm out your content to someone who'll make more distributing it than you'll get in fees).
But, yeah, I don't see Netflix as streaming-only being that great until you can break someone like HBO into giving over their content, and their ability to bully for less cost is going to be taken away by splitting up or spinning off their DVD division. That's economicsFAIL! right there. All other considerations--the fact some people can't stream, that some people like special features, that streaming is unrealiable and prone to last-second loss of content--come second to that, far as I'm concerned.