When MikeK was in San Francisco last month, he had an opportunity to go one on one with Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings. In true blogosphere fashion, before the interview he turned to his readers to find out what they wanted to know about Hastings. The questions ranged from the issue of throttling to the possibility of seeing video games in addition to movies. While it was encouraging to hear Hastings talk about at least watching the video game market, overall I found the interview to be a little discouraging. Throughout the interview, Hastings seems to dodge many of the questions and is very ambiguous about several issues brought up.
When asked about throttling, he defends the practice by pointing to customer service stats instead of looking at the real question of whether or not it fair to not tell consumers what the limit is. While on one level I can understand why he would want to protect this trade secret, on another level I feel like this is one mistake that the company hasn’t properly addressed. By hiding the limit of what it takes for consumers to get a downgrade, they prevent customers from making proper buying decisions. The company can argue that they allocate DVDs fairly, but there is nothing fair about hiding the information from their customers and until they properly address this issue, it will continue to be the one weakness in Netflix’s outstanding customer experience.