Netflix thoughts, question locking, more languages

How about that Netflix, eh?  They always seemed to show so much promise and had what appeared to be a dynamic, forward-thinking management team, but their recent announcement to split up the company into streaming and DVD divisions with no data-sharing between the two is just bizarre, and perhaps even customer-hostile.  Now, the move was admittedly inevitable because the business model for streaming needed to evolve, but it was handled so strangely that one has to wonder what is going on over there.

I could talk about the “Qwikster” brand for the DVD service, too, but I try to avoid using expletives here.

Like a lot of people, I put up with the recent Netflix price hike because the service was still convenient and the Netflix queue is super useful.  But, now that I’ll have to deal with two different companies, two bills, two support systems, and two movie queues, there’s no way I’m keeping both subscriptions.  While it feels like a step backwards in time and away from the promise of THE CLOUD, I’ll probably keep the DVD subscription and drop streaming because the streaming selection is just too poor.  Netflix is bound to lose a good chunk of subscribers to both services over this, and it will be very interesting to see if they can continue to acquire content for their streaming service as their revenue drops.  If not, their business could become a downward spiral very quickly. (Full disclosure: I have had a short position on NFLX for some time now.)

Where do you guys think Netflix is headed?  Can their streaming business survive on its own?

Enough Netflix chatter – on to the real business!  We have just rolled out a couple new features that people had been requesting:

1. Question locking: Admins may now lock individual questions so non-admins may not submit new answers.  To lock questions, make sure you are logged in as an admin, open the popup window, and you’ll see a “Lock” tool next to the “Hide” tool under each question.
2. Site locking: Admins may now lock questions across their entire site, so only they may answer them.  To set this, go to your Dashboard on Degree3.com and click “Edit Site” next to the site you want to edit.  Any visitor to your site may still ask questions, of course, or using our plugin would be pretty pointless, now wouldn’t it?
3. Customize the welcome message: To change the welcome message on your Q&A module, see the bottom of our Customization Guide for details, or if you’re using WordPress, just update your plugin, and it’ll be in your Settings.  Note: this does not apply to the popup window, just the in-page module; if you’re using the tab layout, this does not apply.
4. New languages: Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) and Danish are now available!

Let us know how you like the new features, and keep those feature requests coming – we want to know what’s important to you!