Dear Netflix - 10 Things You Could Do To Make Me Like You Again

Dear Netflix:

You were my favorite company.

You blew it twelve ways to Sunday and now, well,  now, I'm kinda sad about you.  Each month, I forget when you robo-charge me and therefore forget to put my service on hold.  So you get another month to get better.  But you don't.

Since I roam, I only have streaming now.  (Also, since you messed up being able to send stuff to the right address.)

I was pretty happy you've changed your hold policies - as I've been charged for months when my hold ended before I could revise it and the charge went through and then I put a new hold on it.  So, I was excited about that, until I put my account on hold, you didn't pre-notify me, so I didn't change the restart date....and you billed me anyway.  Way to go and thank for the fake heads up.

Here are my ten things you could do to make us all feel better:

1. Unhide the movies that are streaming.  You have to be a detective to find out what's available.  The browsing interface is far inferior to the same but different Netflix site devoted to DVD's.  I have to overload my queue with stuff when I come across it, cause I'm afraid I'll never find it again.
2. Stop recommending things I've already rated.
3. Stop recommending things in only a few weird sub-genres based on some movie I watched like 17 months ago, which was probably a work-related thing anyway.  Example:  "Emotional Dramas based on contemporary literature," and "Quirky movies featuring a strong female lead," and "Classic Crime Movies from the 1960's."
4. You and I both know I have a (real) Netflix account.  I know this because I see that things I've rated on (real) Netflix show up with my ratings on (steaming) Netflix with their ratings.  How bout you automatically put things from my (real) Netflix queue onto my (streaming) Netflix queue when they become available?
5. Make my streaming queue sortable.  How hard is this, really?  Like, can I search it by type or rating or year or ANYTHING?????  This would be a tremendously positive change.
6. Remove things from my (streaming) queue when I've watched them!  Please!  And please make the removing from queue function actually work - things just keep popping back up again and again.
7. When you take things from my queue away from streaming, and then put them back on streaming later, add them back to my queue.  (Can't be that hard, come on.)
8. Stream more better content.  I use your service for research -- there's stuff I have to watch and stuff I need to re-watch.  The paucity of A-movies on here is appalling and embarrassing.  You - Netflix - king of the hill - are now competing for my $7.99 a month with Hulu Plus.  Is this what you want?
9. Stop pretending the movies I search for don't exist if they are not on streaming.  We all know there's a movie called The King's Speech.  In fact, it's available on the same/different Netflix where you send plastic through the mail in red wrappers.  So, really, am I searching for Stephen King's Children of the Corn?  I think not.
10. Allow me to have a streaming wish list queue - a list of things that are not streaming currently that I want to see - and let me know when they start streaming.
11. Think about where you are going.  What happened to the Netflix that offered a million dollars to the person or team who could improve its recommendations algorithm by 10%?  That Netflix was ahead of the curve, thought about its end user and was reliably outstanding.  That Netflix was the Apple to Blockbuster's Microsoft.  That Netflix created and dominated a market.  This Netflix is talking about becoming more like a cable station.  Why would your customers need another cable network?

Okay.  Eleven things.

You were the best of what internet commerce could be.  I still hope for you to become best again.