DVD Voice

Today I get this interesting email from Netflix Customer Service. It is that Netflix will be removing the “profiles” from the accounts. Now, by removing profiles I don’t mean that they will stop profiling you as a customer or even that they were making a profile about you, that I don’t know.

This is what they will be doing. As of September 1, 2008, Profiles on your Netflix account will be gone and the queue of those profiles will be unavailable. They state in the email that they are doing away with this feature to continue to improve the website for all of their customers.

If you’ve never used it, the profile feature I felt was a great one. It would let families sign up for a larger Netflix plan and allocate 1 or 2 DVDs to a member of the family. That way, the Disney movies would be on their daughter’s plan, and the war movies on the fathers, and the kids would get their new movies only when they’ve returned their current ones. I thought this was a great plan especially since the owner of the account could always reassign any of the profiles allocated DVD amounts and restrict the types of movies they could get through the system. But alas. Who knows, really, maybe the Netflix people have something truly greater up their sleeves!

I have no reason to use the profiles system. I did try it. I set up a second profile (for myself) and put a few movies in the queue. I let it have 1 DVD at a time, and could tell by the “name” on the envelope which movie it would be. Pretty cool, actually, kind of like a “mini” account. And, a little embarrassing to admit, I did this primarily to put a few horror films into that profile. I turned off the ability of that profile to use the “community” features and had The Shining sent out. I had my parents on as a friend, but later one day when I was at their house and looked on their account I could see where the movie showed up in my list of recently watched. Yikes. Ok, I know, I shouldn’t care, but since my folks don’t approve of horror, I’d rather not let them know. (I’m scared of them, I admit it).

Netflix customer support is at 888-638-3549 if you’d like to talk to them about it.