Netflix apparently woke up from its stupor and stepped back from the plan to spin off its DVD-rental service into a separate unit called Qwikster. Universally panned by critics and users, the attempt to separate the businesses seemed like a terrible, terrible mistake.
Fortunately for Netflix users, it was a mistake and Netflix has been smart enough to reverse course and listen to the wants of its users. There are other companies I wish would do the same (facebook and Google, I’m looking at you!). Of course, it is really too late for users like me, who already left Netflix when prices increased by 60% or so. I was never a fan of their streaming service, since it never had what I wanted as a stream option. I could get very old things on streaming, including some old television shows, but what I wanted to stream were recent releases most of the time. Or at least, releases from the last ten years or so. I thought the idea of streaming was wonderful, since I could use streaming on my laptop when I was stuck in a hotel room in a random town for an evening. But nothing I ever wanted to see was available through their streaming service.
As for their rentals, We had pretty much watched everything there was to watch that we wanted to watch. At some point, we realized that we were not getting new rentals very often (maybe once or twice a month) and that wasn’t worth what I was paying. It certainly wasn’t going to be worth what I was going to be paying once the price went up. There was a time when movies were coming and going from our mailbox like that flap was a revolving door. But towards the end, when I canceled our service, we just weren’t using the service all that much. That time was past.
And overall, streaming was never really a huge draw for me to begin with, as we have no device with our television that will allow streaming to happen. We don’t game, so there’s no XBox, and we don’t have OTT boxes either. It’s not how we, as a family, operate. And I’m sure we’re not alone.
I’m still happy to see that Netflix knows when it has made a mistake, and is willing to change direction. And if they’d drop their prices back, we might just subscribe again. For now, it will be RedBox and whatever we can pick up from our pretty up-to-date local library. And there’s always MegaVideo, which my teenager uses to watch almost everything.
iTunes | 
Netflix CEO just dropped a bomb shell, he announced that Netflix is splitting their businesses. Netflix will be for streaming and Qwikster a new company will be for renting DVD’s by mail. The two sites will be separate, and you will not get to cross queue, cross search anything.