Throttle of Red
Tuesday, February 14, 2006 at 5:09PM 1 Comment On Sunday, a friend asked me to add for him an arcane home theater calibration DVD to my Netflix queue. I added the DVD to the top of my queue. Its availability was "Now" and I was sending back a couple of movies on Monday. Figure my movies get back to Netflix on Tuesday, I get his movie in the mail on Wednesday, I would get it to him by Thursday. In less than a week, my queue would be restored to pristine condition.
On Monday, this esoteric little DVD had gone from an availability of "Now" to an availability of "Long Wait," with no stop at "Short Wait" in between. The recent publication of an AP story ["'Throttling' Angers Netflix Renters"] about dissatisfaction with the Netflix practice of "throttling" (or "smoothing," as they refer to it at Netflix) got me wondering whether I was getting throttled. Maybe they only have three copies of this DVD at the whole company and ten people queued it at once.
I am not a very heavy renter. I am on the two-at-a-time plan and rent an average of seven per month. I've belonged to Netflix for about three years and overall, I'm very satisfied, though it has recently gotten tougher to get new releases (do that many people really want to see Junebug right now??). Still, I know people who would mail the DVD back the same day it came in, pausing only to rip the DVD to their computer. That's never held much appeal for me. Netflix has to throttle to make their business work. I just want to know if it's happening to me. And if it is, once throttled, can I be un-throttled?? Do I need to slow down my renting for awhile to appease the DVD gods?
Reader Comments (1)
This blog entry gets my nomination for "Best Blog Title 2006." Of course, an even better title may be just around the bend.