Netflix: Two Feature Requests

I’ve said it before in my rants/observations/whatever:  I really love Netflix.  Not a teenager-and-it’s-summer kind of “love”, or a we-met-in-Cancun-a-week-ago-then-got-married kind of “love”… but it’s still love all the same.

Anyways, besides the obvious need for “Watch Now” to work on Linux, I think there’s two things that they should throw in…

User-Rating Feed

In this lovely era of Web 2.0 (note the sarcasm?), not having APIs and Feeds is akin to being a data mongerer.  While I don’t necessarily agree with that, I’d love for a way to automagically say “yeah, here’s all the movies I rated as 4 or 5 stars… great movies!”, like, say, for use in an open-standards profile.

Stars are important.  Not these though.

Netflix, you come so close to doing this that I’ve gotten my hopes up many times.  Hoping that maybe you changed something, or momentarily forgetting it’s not what I think… you have feeds for “Recently Activity”, “Queue”, “Movies at Home”, “Movie Reviews”, and “Recomendations”.  You’d think “Movie Reviews” would have it… right?

Nope.  Apparently it’s only for if you actually write a review.  To me, it would make sense to include at least the rating you give a movie (since that is a review in itself)… even if there’s no writeup associated with it.  But a “filterable” method for pure star-ratings would be best.

Insta-Ship

Sometimes, you just want a movie sooner than you know you’ll get it.  One of the things that has always frustrated me about Netflix has nothing to do with them:  the USPS.

The mail service is so inconsistent and incompetent that I tend to get my movies a day later than Netflix thinks I should, and it takes 3 days for Netflix to receive them.  What happened to “Next-Day”?

This baby loved his insta-shipped movie!

But I have a solution.  Ship the next queued movie as soon as the customer rates one in their “At Home” category, on the assumption that they’ll be shipping the old one within 24 hours, instead of shipping on receipt.  Keep track of a user’s “karma”… if they typically hold on to 3 movies at once when they have a 2 movie plan, stop rating-shipping them and flip back to receipt-shipping.

This would not only be awesome, but it’d be a smarter and more efficient way to deliver rental DVDs by mail… also eliminating most of the excuses “brick and mortar” stores have given for why people shouldn’t use your service.

Different Packaging

sweet a bonus third suggestion!

I can’t help but feel that I’m killing the environment while using Netflix.  Yes, I recycle the rip-open covers.  Yes, I realize you probably reuse the envelopes, to a certain extent, whether through recycling or magically adding new covers… but still.

Why not ship it in a lockable flat DVD case?  The kind that’s something like 1/4″ thick.  It would almost always get returned to you, because the system won’t change.

Don’t make the trees hurt you!

I realize it might be a few cents more expensive to ship it… but if you reuse one box 1000 times, how many envelopes does that save?  How many DVDs don’t get broken because they aren’t in a paper envelope?  How much money is saved from not making new envelopes?

It might even make your customers feel better.  Feel more “green”.

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