“When we see the breakage for Blu-ray to be so infinitesimally small of the total ships, it would be cost-prohibitive for us to change the shipping method,” says Swasey. “We do everything to drive costs down.”

Really? Because I could have sworn you were trying to ask me for more money for these Blu-rays… oh, you mean your costs, my bad.

Source: Wired

How about if NetFlix starts charging per shipped blu-ray disk up to $4?  For instance, every time I rent a blu-ray I have to pay $0.50 extra that month and it goes up to $4, after which its unlimited? I’d be perfectly fine with that.

Asking for more money right now only caused me to cancel my blu-ray access. This is working against what they wanted. Kind of dumb if you ask me.

Blockbuster, if you remember, would always get exclusive deals. They had some real pull because most of a movie’s money is actually made in the rental arena and in licensing. Now that Netflix is on top they can’t talk to other companies to maybe get some flexibility on the Watch Now capabilities?

Microsoft is finally adding DRM to Silverlight sometime this summer, how long will it take for Netflix to catch up? More importantly, how much extra will they charge?

Watch Now has been free for two reasons. One, theyre trying out this whole streaming thing. Two, a large portion of their subscribed base can’t access it because they are on Macs or because they refuse to use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox while on Windows.

Once they open up Watch Now to that bigger user base I am sure they will start charging a premium for it. Just like they announced the second that Blu-Ray won the format war.

Apple is in the Blu-Ray side, well, they were before the format was over and you could pick a side. At some point soon Apple computers will start coming with built-in Blu-Ray drives. At which point, owning a Mac and having Netflix will turn out to be counterproductive. Unless you do not care about watch now, and do not care about Blu-Rays… In which case I’m sure Netflix will not charge you more.

The problem is, right now they are claiming that it is a feature. Your monthly payments are for movies by mail and movies instantly, as stated by this screenshot of their website. They can talk all they want about how its just something extra and it doesn’t factor into the price. The reality is that Netflix is using Watch Now as a feature to add new customers, while their inability, ( adobe has drm on flash) unwillingness, (they’ve stated theyre working on it) plans are to cut down on their bandwidth costs until they can charge everybody more.

For the record, I am a Netflix customer. I am very happy with the mail-in service but am annoyed that I cannot use my Mac to access these extra features I do feel I am subsidizing for Windows users. I also own a PS3 and -will not- be upgrading to Blu-Ray discs. I won’t subsidize Watch Now for others, while at the same time paying extra for the one ‘nifty’ feature I can get.