I received this in e-mail today:
We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.
Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.
While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.
- The Netflix Team
This crap! I've been using Netflix profiles for years. I've got 589 movies set up over 4 different profiles. One profile sends Star Trek (geeky, I know), one profile sends kids movies, one profile sends regular movies, and one profile sends tv shows, like the A-TEAM and Knight Rider and other good shows. Without profiles, there's no good way to make sure that you get an even distribution of movies, since things can be sent out of order, and mixing up 589 sets of movies isn't going to be easy.
They aren't providing you a mechanism for transferring the queues to another queue, they're just dumping them.
I've been thinking about getting a DVR and satellite again and then downgrading my Netflix account. Sounds like it's beyond time to do so.
--update 6/19/08
I was irritated enough that I called them. I got a very snotty service representative that said that only 30,000 of the 8,000,000 people were using the multiple profiles. First of all, the profiles were a pain in the rump to use (multiple log ins, etc), second of all, only their highest paying customers would be using it. If you're only getting one dvd, why bother with another profile??
I told her I was blogging about it and telling everyone I knew and she immediately went into a sales speech. I told her again I was annoyed and she said, "I'll be sure to make a note of it in your account." What??? Not, I'll tell my supervisors, or someone who cares, but instead, I'll dump it into this black hole where the only time it'll be seen is when I call for support again and they read it and predetermine I'm a jerk! Thanks, very helpful.
I loved the part when she said that the engineers wanted to use that space on the servers (and she didn't mean screen real estate) for something else. She's done a lot of web development . . .