I thought I’d recall for you my recent experiences with Netflix. I really love this service, but in the past few months I’ve been concerned about the quality of service delivery I’m getting. Specifically, I routinely get DVDs which are unplayable. I would estimate that, on average, one out of every five DVDs I get are unplayable to some extent.

It’a real pain to get a DVD you can’t play. Especially if you have been planning to watch a movie, and there is nothing else you want to watch. You are essentially stuck. I have been able to copy some of the DVDs using my computer, but that is a huge pain in the butt to do, only to play them once and throw the DVD in the trash. I would much rather simply have Netflix do their jobs better and send me a playable DVD.

Whenever I get a DVD which is unplayable, I simply turn it over and look at the unlabeled side, and guess what? It’s usually scratched up like Hell. Sometimes there is actually dirt, or smudges, or snot, or God-knows-what on it, and I can clean it and get it to play. But most of the time when this happens, I’m out of luck.

Here is what I believe Netflix needs to do to improve upon this issue:

Netflix surely knows how many times EVERY DVD has been sent out. But, they do not know much more. They do not know how many times it has been played by any one customer [but my guess is ONCE], or how it was handled. But there is one thing they DO know, and if they used that information, their DVD replacement algorithm could be greatly improved.

The Netflix DVD replacement algorithm can be improved by considering the following:

I have noticed that, of all the unplayable discs I’ve gotten, most of them are extremely popular movies. In fact, the most damaged discs seem to be of movies that younger adults and/or children would like. Movies like Harry Potter, or Star Trek. Certainly not documentaries, or lesser-known indie movies.

But why should this be? Certainly Netflix has an algorithm that trashes a DVD after a certain number of shipments regardless of genre, right? Well, that is EXACTLY the problem. If you use the SAME number of shipments to indicate replacement for movies that children or young adults watch as you do for, lets’ say, more “mature adults”, I think Netflix is making a big mistake. They need to take into account genre and age of the intended viewer because WHO will be handling the DVD is important. Believe me, adults are not loading and unloading DVD players for their kids…the kids are doing it…and they are not going to be as careful as older folks are. Period.

So, in addition to how many shipments a DVD has undergone, I recommend Netflix modulate this metric with one that takes into account the genre and the intended viewer’s age. The lower this “target age”, the less shipments a DVD gets before it is either inspected or trashed. That’s it. Pretty simple IMHO.

If Netflix does this, their quality of service and customer SAT should shoot up. If they don’t, they will be simply another company willfully practicing What Not to Do.