The UI bugs that I was talking about are in the kinds of features that you'd think they could just develop once, and re-use for both their low-end and high-end phones. e.g. they could have developed an auto-correct for the high-end phone that doesn't change you're to you"re, and then just re-used it on the low-end phone. Wouldn't it actually be more work to develop a separate buggier auto-correct for the cheap phone?

You're very articulate. Your English teacher would be proud.

Now, on behalf of your math teacher, do you actually have a point? i.e. is there a statement in the article you think is incorrect.

I think that's part of the explanation, but it doesn't account for why the phone doesn't suck in other ways -- if manufacturers are lazy and cheap, why has the camera resolution, for example, evolved to the point where it's really pretty good? And I think the answer is that camera resolution is quantifiable in a standard way, so it puts more pressure on the manufacturers to compete, whereas usability and bugginess are not.

And I just noticed that all instances of the word "shit" were bleeped out in the article.

Original title that I submitted as "My LG Optimus Cellphone Sucks Worse Than It's Supposed To". Apparently "sucks" is now too profane for Slashdot :)

What I mean is, why doesn't Netflix also become another stream-for-cash provider like iTunes or Google Play, so that if the user searches for a title that's not available for free streaming, Netflix can prompt the user, "Stream this title now for $5." We know there's no barrier to Netflix doing that (because iTunes and Google Play do it), and surely Netflix is leaving cash on the table by not becoming such a provider, since if the user is really jonesing to watch that specific movie at that point, they'll just leave the Netflix site and go buy it on iTunes.

Yeah, I guess that is a simpler form of the same question.

I asked the question the way that I did because I designed my idea to be as close as possible to the existing DVD-by-mail situation, so that people couldn't nit-pick differences between the two scenarios. But it's essentially, "Why don't the studios let Netflix stream the titles that it currently only offers by physical DVD, for some amount of money that could be split between the studios and Netflix?"

A more puzzling fact is that if you search for a movie on Netflix streaming and they don't have it available for streaming, nothing comes up. That would certainly seem like a case where they're just leaving cash on the table, since if they offered the user the chance at that point to stream the movie for $4.99, at least some users would take it. As it is, the user either just streams something else, or goes to a different service like iTunes to buy what they wanted.

Yes this could be an explanation for why there is no streaming of older content that was made before contracts were written to take streaming into account.

However, for more recently made movies, when everybody knew about streaming when the movies were made and the contracts were written, it doesn't explain why the studios release those movies as physical DVDs for Netflix to mail to people, but not as "virtual DVDs" that they could sell to Netflix for the same price, and that Netflix could then "check out" to people.

My wording was unclear; what I meant was that for the movies that Netflix has available on DVD (but not available on Netflix streaming), it's much more expensive to stream each of those movies if you buy/rent it from Google Play or iTunes, than it is if you just queue them up and have them mailed to you through Netflix. So that's possibly how the studios are price-targeting people: If you're willing to go through the inconvenience of queueing up movies, waiting for them in the mail, and then watching them on a clunky old 20th-century DVD, you can watch all those movies at a pretty cheap cost per movie. If you bought or rented those samne movies on iTunes it would cost much more.

Right, nothing I've said would apply to the people who already let their stuff be streamed on Netflix.

I'm only talking about the cases where studios only allow the movie to be mailed out on a physical DVD. Why don't they allow the same movie to be "checked out" on a "virtual DVD", under the same terms? (Netflix has to "buy" the virtual DVD for the same price as the physical DVD, users are capped at 20 "virtual DVD" rentals per month, etc.)

Yes this was actually one of the answers I came up with in the original original article:
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
that maybe they didn't allow virtual DVD checkouts because it competes with the impulse buys.

So then I wondered: why don't they just allow "virtual DVD" checkouts with a delay imposed between the time you check out the movie and the time that you can start streaming it? That would avoid competing with the impulse buys, and it would work "like the DVD by mail service", except that it wouldn't require the user to deal with clunky physical DVDs.

One possibility is that people would then blame Netflix for the delay and resent them for it. Whereas when Netflix mails you the DVD, people blame the mail service for the DVD and maintain happy feelings towards Netflix.

OK, but then why sell physical DVDs in a cooperative agreement to Netflix at all, isn't that also undermining their sales of streams? Why don't they make it difficult every time for Netflix to acquire their movies, the way they did with John Carter?

In other words, the question is, why do the studios allow users to "check out" a fixed number of premium movies per month (about 20) via DVD-by-mail, but don't let users do the same thing for streams. The answer can't simply be about undermining their iTunes stream sales, because both the DVDs and the "virtual DVDs" would undermine the iTunes stream sales.

That is a good point, but unfortunately it doesn't work as an answer to the question, because even if the original agreement is at gunpoint, it doesn't explain why both parties don't agree to replace it with another agreement that makes both sides more money.

Imagine the dialog:
Netflix: "We'll give you $20 per DVD and rent them to our users, let's just make it a cooperative process to reduce the hassle, otherwise we'll just go out and buy them at retail and do the same thing." [cocks gun]
Studio: "*sigh* fine. But as long as we're doing that anyway, why don't we also sell you some 'virtual DVDs' which you agree to only 'check out' to one home user at a time, with a cap of 20 monthly 'virtual DVD checkouts'. The total gross revenue from users will be more, because we'll rope in some additional users who wouldn't want to deal with physical DVDs."
Netflix: "Sounds good."

That would bring in more money, and that's what makes it an interesting question as to why they don't do it.

That's an interesting theory. It certainly could explain why some old stuff might not be available for streaming.

On the other hand, the explanation wouldn't work for any movie made after the advent of streaming, since surely at the time that the movie was made, they could have written clauses into the contracts to cover that.

Well obviously I don't mean "Why doesn't Netflix just barge ahead do this without the studios' permission?" What I mean is: Why don't the studios allow Netflix to stream movies to users under the same terms that they mail the physical DVDs to users -- so you're capped at, say, 20 per month, and Netflix still has to pay the studios for the "virtual DVDs" that it "checks out" to users. So everybody still gets paid, and Netflix and the studios would theoretically make more money, because they'd make additional revenue off of users who won't sign up currently because they don't want to deal with physical DVDs.

Obviously, I don't mean to imply that Netflix and the studios haven't thought about this. What I mean is: assuming they have thought about it and decided not to do it, what is their reasoning? There's no obvious answer as to why they don't do this, since it would enable them to make additional money off of people who don't want to deal with physical DVDs. My best guess was that it's a price discrimination tactic (where DVDs are the deliberately inconvenient option targeted at price-conscious users, while less price-conscious users just buy or rent the same movies online, which costs more). There may be other possible answers.