"The Big Owe" and other assorted things
Montreal's Olympic Stadium (or Stade Olympique) stands as the ultimate monument (thus far) to the folly of public financing for stadia. It also betrays the axiom that hosting Olympic Games is a financial benefit to a municipality. The facility was built to lure the Summer Olympic games to Quebec in 1976, which it did successfully. It also housed Major League Baseball's Expos from 1977 until 2004 when the league stripped the city of its franchise because it refused to go into debt again on another stadium. "The Big O," or alternately, "The Big Owe," was finally paid in full in 2006 after the original promise of a $134 million (Canadian) price tag had ballooned to the real-world figure of $1.61 billion.
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Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sent me a lovely email this week apologizing for the manner in which the company announced the changes to its mailing and streaming movie services earlier in the year. I refuse to accept his apology because the mea culpa is really just an underlining-- and attempted re-branding-- of the same corporate restructuring theory. You see, like many of you, I'm on the wrong side of Hasting's projected future for his company. Netflix ultimately wants to get rid of its mail service because it costs them more money to use postage and deliver manually than it does to stream on-line, yet the number of movie and television titles Netflix is able to stream on our computers is severely limited and promises to be severely limited well into the future.
The company is betting that most of their customers are rather indifferent to what they watch and that the smaller streaming library will ultimately suffice our artistic tastes. That's not me. I don't watch what I perceive to be shit, just to fill an evening's time, in the same way that I don't go to the local multiplex and simply watch the most interesting movie on the bill. Instead, I check the movie listings first, and if nothing good is playing, I don't go. Announcing that the company is splitting off its mail service as a separate subsidiary called "Qwikstar" is just Netflix doubling down on their very faulty, and already very unpopular, new strategy.
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A week ago, I would have told you that "Qwikstar" was the name of the place down on the corner where I fill up my gas tank.
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Here's some better than average wisdom I picked up in a fortune cookie today: An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.
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Melissa McCarthy's performance this summer in the film "Bridesmaids" was so good that it won the actress an Emmy for a TV show called "Mike & Molly." But that's nothing compared to Martin Scorsese. He won an Emmy Sunday night for making "Raging Bull" in 1980.
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A Cardinals' playoff run is better than sex. Or maybe my memory is just bad. And of course, by that, I mean that the Cardinals haven't been in a good pennant race since 2009.
posted by CM @ 12:22 PM
5 Comments:
I fail to understand why people think this netflix move doesn't make perfect sense. Streaming movies and receiving them in the mail is a completely different enterprise, here's why: nobody will bother with DVDs in the very near future. I know so many people who've heard say this is such a cruel thing to do to customers but it "doesn't affect me" because I already cancelled my DVD service.
So many of those shows and movies are available elsewhere, like Hulu, the netflix post office budget is probably draining the whole company. Companies have to change to survive and have to be forward thinking. What's so hard to believe about that?
Companies are in business to make money and he doesn't want to go out of business in a competitive environment.
So accept his apology on this matter. Don't be a dick.
He offers us less service for more money. Then he tries to re-sell the same move through an "apology" written by corporate consultants because the move had cost them a million customers and a 15% drop in their stock price.
If he was trying to stay in business, he and other Netflex executives wouldn't have sold off huge chunks of their own personal stock. He's not trying to stay in business, he's trying to get bought out and run to the bank. That's about him, not me. He can stuff his sorrys in a sack.
Never make the mistake of believing that capitalism is about providing you a service. Your capitalist doesn't love you.
Netflix didn't apologize to me. Reed Hastings did. "Dear Christopher," it read. Man to man.
"Your capitalism doesn't love you" is a clever line, but you're picking the wrong battle.
Anyone with any forsight can see that the DVD business will be as obsolete as VHS tapes in the very near future. Not to mention, that he obviously understands his primary business model upon which he built his business is reliant on the US Post Office which is about to go to a 5 day business week. That means if your DVDs aren't in the mail by Wednesday, you're not getting your next one until Monday. How would you suggest he deals with this problem his government has presented him with? He's actually giving people an out by letting them switch to instant view only at a reduced rate.
Not every jack in price is part of an organized master plan or insidious war being waged against the proletariat.
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