Netflix Profiles Gone Awry

Last night, under the warm blanket of a pre-equinox evening, I received an email notification from that purveyor of red envelopes, Netflix, declaring that they would be eliminating the profiles feature from their service.  For the uninitiated, the profiles feature was a fantastic way for any Netflix household to allocate discs amongst family members so everyone could rent whatever they wanted with no argument or hassle.  Under the new guidelines, ratings and individual account statistics would be merged together under the main profile and no doubt, havoc would ensue. 

Let's look at it this way.  Grace and I definitely have differing movie tastes and while there is overlap, it would be increasingly difficult for us to find movies to watch together if I was the only person choosing movies for the queue.  Yes, it is easy for me to give her access to the main profile, but it is awful convenient for us to have the separate queues rather than have a constant shuffling of DVD priority.  I can understand that not every netflix member does this, but for those who do, this is an awesome feature.

There are a couple of claims Netflix has made to justify this move.  The customer service email attributes it to the development of new features.  Specifically, there is nothing mentioned so we are supposed to take a leap of faith and accept that we will love these new features, whatever they are.  The second claim I have read is that the profiles feature was cumbersome and confusing to certain users.  Perhaps it was deemed superfluous, but there's no way to know this unless there is data from Netflix to back this up.  Perhaps only 10% of members are utilizing the profiles feature, but the blog posts and comments I've read so far tell me this can't be. 

My conclusion is that it is possibly a cost issue.  With each new account there is the possibility of 4 or more profiles being added to the system.  Maintenance, architecture, who knows what, I'm sure is affected by this multiplication.  Add to this the potential move from physical rental to high-definition streaming and you end up with a lot of moveable data clogging up the works.  I'm hardly qualified to make this sort of assumption, but it could be a possibility.

The overall feeling of that initial e-mail is disappointment.  We love our Netflix account.  Every time one of those red envelopes comes in the mail we actually get a little excited, especially if it's one of "our" movies.  I don't know if I'll take the extreme action of leaving the Netflix fold, but unless they come up with a better explanation, I may have to.