I’ve been a Netflix subscriber now for over a year and have been consistently impressed with them.  I remember when they began their limited “Watch Instantly” feature, and then when they made it unlimited without charging a cent more for the service.  Then I remember getting a message saying my monthly subscription rate was being lowered because they had repriced my plan.  In other words, in a matter of months I got the huge value add of their “Watch Instantly” feature (which now has an impressive library featuring lots of great movies and TV shows), and was paying less for it!  That alone bought them some serious points in my book.

Recently I ran across a movie that looked interesting (Bottle Shock) which was available on Netflix to view online.  However, unlike every other movie I’ve tried streaming through Netflix, this one had an error whenever I tried to play it.  I tried to find an answer through the website but it seemed the only way to tell them about the problem was via their customer service phone number.  Not excited to wait on hold to fix this problem, I finally gave in after being unable to find a fix otherwise.  The website gave a code that I could give once I called which tied that service call to my account, bypassing any need to give their representative any information.  After I typed this in, a friendly guy named Brian immediately answered.  I told him my problem, and he quickly confirmed that that movie was having issues playing in their “old player.”  I wasn’t aware there was a new one, but he had an email sent to me telling me how to upgrade.  After maybe 2 minutes on the phone, I had the email, clicked a link (www.netflix.com/silver), pushed a browser button, and viola, their new Silverlight-based player was activated and the movie played in the new player (and seemed to take less time to buffer at that).  For a company with so many subscribers to have such friendly and responsive customer service is extremely impressive, and yet another reason I plan to remain a loyal Netflix customer.