Just out of curiosity, why would maintaining two accounts be so painful? If that were so, wouldn't it be equally painful to maintain different social network accounts (assuming you have two or more).
Netflix is the one recurring bill on my credit card. I like the company and think it has great customer service. I trust the company. I don't want multiple recurring charges on my credit card. The more paid accounts a person has the more likely it is that an account will be forgotten about.
Also, it would be a pain to find out a movie isn't available for streaming and then having to login to another account to put the movie in its cue. And I don't want to browse DVDs and put one in my queue when it's available for streaming.
But its not a new company. Its the same organization headed by the same person with the same employees as before. There is just some different branding.
The new branding includes a CEO and it's being billed separately. Not to mention being completely separated online (no shared ratings or searching). It's a different company.
Billing will be separate, which is a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
The bigger issue is splitting my ratings and thus my suggestions. I already ignore other places to rate movies since only netflix provided a tangible benefit to me. Split it, and it won't.
With billing, most of us already maintain different accounts with different e-commerce sites. One more is not that bad. Ratings on either Qwikster or Netflix will benefit you because of the improved recommendations. Yes, it's a shame they won't be integrated, but overall the split will benefit the company and its customers.
Everyone on this thread knows that there is no technical reason to split the ratings. It's implausible that a company of this size couldn't break that subsystem into a shared service.
The reason for the split has to be business-related, and my best bet is to create a very clean separation of intellectual property. This among other things is why I find the post disingenuous.
Yeah, to me this looks like a way to isolate the profit-making but old-school DVD business from the disruptive but fragile streaming platform. Studios are squeezing streaming providers for royalties at the moment, and sooner or later either the small players will fold, or streaming will fully replace dvds; by splitting services, Reed is trying to maximize its chances of maintaining at least one solid business.
Still, the right thing to do would be to maintain technical integration between the two, maybe spinning off the analytics / suggestions as a third company providing services to both for a nominal fee.
