Billing will be separate, which is a minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.
The bigger issue is splitting my ratings and thus my suggestions. I already ignore other places to rate movies since only netflix provided a tangible benefit to me. Split it, and it won't.
With billing, most of us already maintain different accounts with different e-commerce sites. One more is not that bad. Ratings on either Qwikster or Netflix will benefit you because of the improved recommendations. Yes, it's a shame they won't be integrated, but overall the split will benefit the company and its customers.
Everyone on this thread knows that there is no technical reason to split the ratings. It's implausible that a company of this size couldn't break that subsystem into a shared service.
The reason for the split has to be business-related, and my best bet is to create a very clean separation of intellectual property. This among other things is why I find the post disingenuous.
Yeah, to me this looks like a way to isolate the profit-making but old-school DVD business from the disruptive but fragile streaming platform. Studios are squeezing streaming providers for royalties at the moment, and sooner or later either the small players will fold, or streaming will fully replace dvds; by splitting services, Reed is trying to maximize its chances of maintaining at least one solid business.
Still, the right thing to do would be to maintain technical integration between the two, maybe spinning off the analytics / suggestions as a third company providing services to both for a nominal fee.
The bigger issue is splitting my ratings and thus my suggestions. I already ignore other places to rate movies since only netflix provided a tangible benefit to me. Split it, and it won't.