It seems to be a popular rhetorical device these days to describe any opposition to something you favor as a declaration of war against it. The first time I remember hearing it was some twenty years ago, during one of the periodic battles over the National Endowment for the Arts, in which conservatives object to federal funding of offensive art (or, in some cases, "art"): Andrei Codrescu was on NPR denouncing "the Republican war on art" (or should that be "Art"?). And currently, in a slight variation of the theme, if you believe the rich should be taxed more heavily, some will say that you are engaging in class warfare. Others say that if you believe the rich should not be taxed more heavily, you are engaging in class warfare.
So, in the spirit of the times, I wish to denounce the Netflix war on me–specifically, on my ability to have affordable access to a vast library of movies. As you may have heard, Netflix is about to split into two businesses, one of which will retain the name and will only provide "content" streamed over the Internet. The other will continue the DVD rental business and will be called…it's hard for me even to type this…Qwikster. It is being said by the business-savvy that the company wants to get out of the DVD business because streaming is the future, and that it will either sell or slowly kill the DVD business. And I must say that if I planned to destroy a company I would certainly want to give it a meaningless, yet somehow stupid-sounding, name like…Qwikster. I may end my account just to avoid seeing that name–or, God forbid, finding myself in the position of needing to say it.
Really, this is depressing news. For several years my wife and I have had a Netflix account that allowed us to keep either two or three DVDs at a time, and for the first couple of those years gorged ourselves on a lot of the movies we'd always wanted to see but were too obscure to be available as rentals in local video stores, but too expensive to buy (and anyway there aren't that many movies I want to see more than once). For the past year we've cut way back, because we've been too busy, but we are still steady customers. There are probably close to a hundred titles in our queue.
As it turns out, according to some comments I've seen, we are exactly the kind of customers Netflix wants to get rid off. The DVD-by-mail business is one of those where the idea is to sell people something they don't use: every DVD that Netflix mails to us reduces the money they get to keep from our monthly fee. They want people who will sign up, get a movie, let it sit around the house unwatched for a week, watch it, and let it sit around the house for another week before remembering to send it back. They don't want people like me who, having watched a movie, immediately take the DVD out of the player and put it back in the envelope, seal it up, and set it somewhere near the front door so they won't forget to put it in the mail the next morning.
I'm sure the rental business won't disappear overnight, and in theory a streaming library containing everything currently available on DVD would be just as good. But I have a feeling it won't work out that way. More likely it would become the Internet version of cable TV, offering a vast amount of garbage, and making it impossible to get the little bit of good stuff without also paying for the garbage. Business Week already predicts the rental business will be sold. And Megan McArdle of The Atlantic thinks both companies are doomed. It's striking, and rather dismaying, how convoluted the business and technical aspects of these enterprises can become.
Light On Dark Water 
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