Netflix Plan Is One Giant JK

It’s been three weeks since Netflix first made clear the murky details of its plan to split its streaming and DVD plans with a new company called Qwikster, and that’s also about how long it took for Netflix to renege the plan altogether.

In a blog post this morning, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote:

It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.

This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster.

And because a little is never enough, later to the New York Times, Hastings offered this in a statement: “Consumers value the simplicity Netflix has always offered and we respect that. There is a difference between moving quickly — which Netflix has done very well for years — and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case.”

Hastings, you nailed it. It’s obviously not a good move when a company that’s practically a household name moves too fast and goes renegade on its customer, plans to split its business, decides on a new name without doing a thorough background check (see: joint-smoking Elmo on Twitter), provides vague initial info about the changes, and follows-up with a clarifying blog post, before eventually turning around and going back to the original plan, albeit with a hike in prices. Basically, it’s one big JK, dear customer, so please respond with some LOLsies and open up your wallet.

I’m disappointed. This was finally going to be the year I jumped on and joined. But while Netflix continues to toy with its identity and rattle its customers, I’ll gladly continue to stream via any number of other services and hit up the dollar-a-pops out of the nearby RedBox.