Con­sumers are enraged at Net­flix’ steep price increases with good rea­son — a 60% increase is hard to take dur­ing a pro­longed reces­sion. As a result well over 1 mil­lion have already can­celled their sub­scrip­tion.

From the consumer’s POV, Net­flix’ lat­est plans to split the offer­ing into two unre­lated ser­vices, Net­flix and Qwik­ster, are utterly ridicu­lous. Infu­ri­at­ing. And per­haps fatal to the company’s longevity.

Net­flix has given its cus­tomers the rea­son — and the moti­va­tion — to look else­where for a bet­ter value.

A Broken Brand Promise

The heavy-handed moves by the com­pany are caus­ing me to rethink how much, if any, I want of Net­flix’ ser­vice in the future. Like mil­lions of other Net­flix sub­scribers who have become dis­en­chanted with the brand.

One of the rea­sons for the furor that’s fuel­ing the con­sumer back­lash is Net­flix’ bro­ken brand promise. We used to believe Net­flix stood as a shin­ing exam­ple of a con­sumer-cen­tered mod­ern cor­po­ra­tion.

Now we real­ize it was just a big myth that we col­lec­tively bought into. Myself included.

Net­flix has squan­dered our trust and lost our loy­alty. They’ve pol­luted their brand. Can they over­come this dam­age?

Setting Up for Streaming Is Not Easy

Net­flix is clearly stak­ing its future on main­stream adop­tion of stream­ing and dig­i­tal down­loads as the pre­ferred way to “con­sume” movies, music, TV episodes, games, etc.

But there’s a lurk­ing prob­lem that no one has acknowl­edged in the furor that’s rag­ing across the blo­gos­phere. And that’s user expe­ri­ence.

If you plan to stream movies to a PC, Mac or an Apple-branded con­sumer device (like Apple TV or iPad), con­fig­ur­ing Net­flix and enter­ing your cre­den­tials are not too dif­fi­cult. It’s easy if you’re using a device that’s equipped with a key­board.

But heaven help you if you’re using a tra­di­tional con­sumer elec­tron­ics device and must enter user cre­den­tials with a remote con­trol device. (You might want to con­sult a teenage geek who’s com­fort­able with remotes as an input device.)

To make things worse, just because you’ve got­ten it work­ing once doesn’t mean your Net­flix con­fig­u­ra­tion will keep work­ing indef­i­nitely. Soft­ware updates by Net­flix and/or your con­sumer elec­tron­ics device man­u­fac­turer can cause the con­fig­u­ra­tion to stop work­ing. So you con­front the user expe­ri­ence issues all over again.

Net­flix doesn’t exert much influ­ence over the con­sumer elec­tron­ics ecosys­tem, so the user expe­ri­ence prob­lems are sys­temic and likely to per­sist…

The Remote Was Not Designed as a Keyboard Substitute

Over the past sev­eral months I’ve wasted hours try­ing to keep Net­flix stream­ing to our flat-screen TV, using Sony PlaySta­tion 3 and the PlaySta­tion net­work as the inter­face to Net­flix. My first attempt to con­fig­ure stream­ing took sev­eral hours (includ­ing sev­eral ses­sions on my Mac to get online help).

After the ini­tial setup it worked just fine — until Sony’s PlaySta­tion net­work was hacked and every­thing had to be reset. Since then I’ve had to reset the con­fig­u­ra­tion more than once. I’m not sure if this is caused by Sony’s fre­quent soft­ware updates or some con­flict between the PlaySta­tion net­work and Net­flix.

Need­less to say, if your inter­face to a con­sumer elec­tron­ics device is a TV remote, hav­ing to enter mul­ti­ple sets of user IDs and pass­words is a non-triv­ial and frus­trat­ing exer­cise. The fact that what­ever you type when enter­ing your pass­word is masked with aster­isks — ******** — increases your chances of wast­ing your time due to typos that occur when you use a remote as an infe­rior key­board sub­sti­tute.

My Netflix Solution on the PS3

To fix the bro­ken Net­flix con­fig­u­ra­tion required con­sult­ing both Net­flix’ and Sony’s sup­port resources online. Not sur­pris­ingly they weren’t coor­di­nated. Net­flix’ site turned out to be dis­tinctly unhelp­ful, and Sony’s site required some real dig­ging to find the solu­tion.

Not to men­tion wait­ing until server main­te­nance was done (dur­ing prime time, I might add).

The even­tual solu­tion was:

1. man­u­ally reset the date and time on the PS3
2. unin­stall the Net­flix app on the PS3
3. down­load and rein­stall the Net­flix app
4. re-enter my user ID and pass­word for Net­flix (using the remote, of course).

Oh — and I for­got to men­tion that Sony required me to reset my pass­word to the PlaySta­tion net­work before begin­ning this whole pro­ce­dure — yet another frus­trat­ing bat­tle with the remote as key­board sub­sti­tute.

This may sound sim­ple, but using the remote as an input device for activ­i­ties designed for a key­board meant that these steps took well over an hour — once I under­stood what was required to fix the prob­lem in first place. Find­ing the solu­tion required use of a com­puter.

Net net –

Given the on-going lack of coor­di­na­tion between Net­flix and con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pa­nies when it comes to user expe­ri­ence, usabil­ity issues like these will prove to be Net­flix’ Achilles heel if their future depends on happy cus­tomers.

Thank­fully, Net­flix has lis­tened to their cus­tomers and responded. Plans for Qwik­ster have been aban­doned — the ser­vice will not be split in two.