Netflix CEO on new branding for DVD service

Netflix CEO on new branding for DVD service

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.

While this would seem obvious to most people, this kind of insight seems to be rare in any CEO.

… if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.

This seems like the worst part about the change. Even with separate web sites, why couldn’t they continue to share the same recommendations database? It’s one of the best things about Netflix, and something they’ve invested a lot in. For customers that subscribe to both, each service will suffer because of it - but more so, the service that the customer uses less, which Netflix seems to expect will be the DVD service.

To me, this really confirms–if anyone still harboured any hope otherwise–that they really do not care about the DVD business at all any more.