Netflix increases wall between DVD and streaming

If you're a streaming-only Netflix customer, the way you interact with the site is becoming increasingly different than those who have both instant and DVD-by-mail services on their account. Perhaps it's a good thing if you have no intentions of ever adding DVD support to your account, but then again, it looks like the site is trying to slowly weed out that side of its business altogether.

The first major change that users are noticing is that if you have a streaming-only subscription for Netflix, if you search for a movie and the site doesn't have streaming rights but does have DVDs available, that movie will simply not show up in your search results. Okay, that sort of makes sense, although for legacy users, it was nice to know that Netflix recognized your search, and you could get affirmation that it was in the site's database but just not available for streaming.

The bigger issue for customers is that Netflix is now splitting reviews for individual titles based on the account type. So if you watch a movie through Netflix streaming, and I get the same movie as a DVD-by-mail customer, and we both post reviews of the same movie, your review will only be visible to streaming users and mine will only be visible to DVD users. Although it isn't quite as drastic as creating a completely separate DVD service, it does look like Netflix is trying to break the two services apart as much as possible.

[via VentureBeat]