Dear Microsoft,



Forcing people to pay for Xbox Live in order to use Netflix and other services is a real jerk move (and by ‘jerk move’, I mean greedy).



I can stream Netflix from a computer, a smartphone, a tablet, a PS3, a Roku, and plenty of other places, all completely free of charge, as long as I have a subscription to the Netflix streaming service.



On the Xbox 360 you require that I have an Xbox Live subscription in addition to a Netflix subscription in order to do this. Xbox Live costs $9.99, $8.33, or $5 a month depending upon how long I commit to the service. The subscription to Xbox Live is not technically necessary to stream Netflix but you’ve made it an arbitrary requirement none the less. You've effectively doubled the price of watching Netflix through the Xbox 360 for no apparent reason other than that you want the extra money.



The pay-for Xbox Live service is rapidly becoming an entirely extraneous middle-man, especially when you won’t even use it to protect us from having to pay for meta-services that we don’t want.



Once customers realize how unnecessary Xbox Live actually is to the fulfillment of what they want from a gaming console / set top box, you’ll quickly begin to see defection to competing products. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

All of the above applies to services other than Netflix. Take YouTube for instance, which is free to watch pretty much everywhere else, but you ask us to pay to use it on the Xbox 360. What, might I ask, is the difference that makes you think you can charge me to watch YouTube on the Xbox 360 while I could just as easily hook up a computer to my TV and watch it for free?