What Information Do Your Readers Want?

I recently began streaming to my TV directly from the Internet. Between Hulu and Netflix I found that there’s not much else that I need. I would like more live sports because sites like ESPN360 use a proprietary format that only seems to work on my computer, but it probably won’t be long for that.

I switched movie providers from Blockbuster to Netflix just because of the streaming movies. I usually enjoy reading their email to find out about new releases or older movies that I may not have heard about. Netflix seems to to a better job of matching my movie ratings to other movies that I may not have seen yet.

The reason that I’m writing this post is that I keep getting emails from Netflix that say “We hope you’re enjoying DVDs by mail. Did you know you can also have some movies & TV episodes streamed instantly to your TV? Watch as much as you want, as often as you want, anytime you want.” These emails arrive almost every other day and it’s a bit annoying because they know that I began streaming movies the day I joined. I know they know this because they always ask me to rate movies that I just streamed.

It would be far better if they sent me email messages asking about how they could improve the streaming service, suggest titles not yet in my queue or to rate movies that I’ve watched and had not yet rated.

It would probably be better if they just stopped sending me these kind of messages and not replace them with something more relevant.

A good lesson to keep in mind if your sending email “Blasts” (even that word is annoying) to your subscribers. If you annoy many of them with content that they’re not interested in they may just unsubscribe, even if some of your messages are relevant. It’s best to find out what they’re interested in and keep your lists sorted by that information.

FYI – In case your interested, this is the box that I bought to do this, also the PlayOn media server. A one time cost of about $190.00. The Netflix service will also work with many other devices including most of the game consoles. I’m saving about $11 a month on Blockbuster $19.99 (3 movies at a time) vs Netflix $8.99 (1 movie at a time plus streaming) and a ton of cash not having cable TV.