Following a recent price hike that nearly doubled his company’s monthly movie rental costs, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wondered how else he could piss off his loyal customer fanbase. “I thought to myself, hmm, now that I’ve made my service more expensive, how can I make it less convenient as well?” Hastings wondered.
What followed was a long-winded, unclear, apologetic email full of poor attempts at humility to the entire Netflix community. And in one inexplicable move of strong business-minded genius, Hastings officially announced, somewhere in the eighth paragraph or so, that the online and DVD services would be split into two separate websites, because they’re “two different businesses.” And if you look at the internet, different businesses can never, ever coexist on a single website. It just doesn’t happen.
The DVD portion of the company is now dubbed “Qwikster.” And unfortunately for Netflix, the Twitter account for “@Qwikster” is owned and operated by one Jason Castillo, a pothead who types in broken English and tweets about making tacos, blazing, and how the water scares him when he turns on the shower. Before changing it today, his avatar was an illustration of popular children’s icon Elmo smoking a joint.
Mr. Castillo is likely to come into a lot of money for squatting on the future DVD service’s name. Actually, maybe it would just be easier for Hastings and the rest of the Netflix community if they just gave ownership of the company to this guy. He might forget to mail out the DVDs, or steal some of them for himself, but at least he’ll probably own up to it on his Twitter account more honestly than Hastings has in those long, boring emails.
In other news, Blockbuster is looking to take advantage of their competitor’s situation as soon as they pay their shipping and handling bills from four months ago.
