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I think that you are upset about the subscription model not serving your use case. Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available. Customers instead share their accounts with family members. It is dirty rotten piracy and anyone doing it is stealing bread from the mouths of babes, but that's what happens when the legitimate system fails to offer the delivery model that the customer wants.

My story: I have amazon prime, but no proper screens that can watch it (linux) and there isn't much on prime that I care to watch anyway. So my parents in another state use the account. Should amazon care? They are still only streaming to one IP but the reality is that we are all pirates.

Hm, that's bizarre, I can watch Amazon Prime on Linux.

you have (or your distro has) installed the widevine drm plugins for firefox (or whatever browser) that are included by default on windows and mac os. these are proprietary plugins, but some convenience-oriented distros distros include them because many users expect them.

some linux users are on linux because they want to eliminate proprietary software from their computer altogether. which means no access to un-broken drm media.

I think it depends on how mainstream your distro is, or maybe on what browser you use. When I used Linux, every streaming platform ever told me that my browser wasn't compatible to stream.

>> I can watch Amazon Prime on Linux.

Everything and anything it possible on linux. The question is whether I want to bother. I could probably disable my browser's security features and get it working, install some proprietary whatever, but it isn't worth than hassle imho. I've got better stuff to watch than netflix/amazon junk. Whenever I have a hour to kill my first choice tends to be the BBC.

> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available. Customers instead share their accounts with family members

PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.

Ultimately the best delivery model for the customer would be $0 for unlimited free streaming of movies and music, of course that would tank the industry and stop new production so a balance must be found in terms of what customers will tolerate vs what is needed to fund new content production.

> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.

Which is insanely expensive. $5 buys a month of Apple TV+, almost 2 weeks of Netflix, or 2 hours of PPV.

But this was in response to:

> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?

So that's $10. Or sign up for just a month and then cancel. I know people who have Netflix for a few months, and then another service for a few months and so on.

I still remember having to rent movies/TV or buying on DVD as my main way of watching... at 4-6 movies a month and ~$20-30 per season of TV, you'd have to have quite a few streaming services to match that. It's all about convenience vs cost.

It was more directly in response to:

> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available.

and

> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.

Yes, PPV is available, but it costs the same to watch a couple movies every month as to subscribe to a whole streaming service. That makes it effectively unavailable (at a reasonable price) for many consumers.

Why isn't a la carte video available at a reasonable markup (say, 200% the cost of 2 hours of a streaming service given the average monthly viewing time)?

Costs like those of the Netflix hardware deployed to the edge, including maintenance (and business relation maintenance) don't scale down anywhere near linearly with hours of content watched, neither does the cost of content licensing (especially, I would assume, exclusives).

So, expecting prices to scale that way for limited-quantity purchases is unreasonable.

I think customers end up achieving similar costs by sharing accounts, or by signing up for one month per year, or by skipping Netflix altogether because there isn't enough content they want to watch to justify the monthly fee.

I think this reflects the reality that for a product with low marginal costs, bundling provides better value for the consumer. If a company is going make the investment to build and operate a video streaming service and acquire you as a customer, it only costs them a few dollars more to let you watch the whole catalogue on demand (the effort to amass this catalog is largely amortized across the customer base). Competing for each individual pay per view purchase is a much worse business to be in, and that’s reflected in the poorer value proposition offered to customers. There’s also some price discrimination occurring (selling to people who really want to watch this specific movie that isn’t offered in their favorite streaming service, or who don’t watch enough movies to subscribe).

The same can be observed in some other industries: museum membership, ski pass.

> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?

This seems more like an edge case. If grandma is only watching a couple movies per year, would Netflix even bother throwing up a warning message? If she didn’t have her own profile in your account, it would be difficult for Netflix to even know if this was a shared account or if you were just logging in at her house during an occasional visit.

They’re not rolling this out to go after grandma watching a couple movies per year.

It’s more likely that they’re targeting the heavy users who share a single account. People who would have their own subscription in a heartbeat if they could no longer exploit the shared account loophole.

You actually bring up a good point. I thought that they'll just show this message to everyone, but maybe you're right and they analyze the usage somehow to only notify people who are abusing it.

Else, how do you handle people going on business trips and vacations?

>If grandma is only watching a couple movies per year, would Netflix even bother throwing up a warning message?

Yes. In every scenario that a company could cut cost, they've done it. If they haven't done it yet, they will do it. Absolutely 100% Netflix is going to cut grandma off.

What's it to Netflix to throw up a message saying "little Timmy, if you're there in the room with grandma then it shouldn't be a problem for you to enter the 6 digit code we just sent to your phone." That's what they're trialing now. Next you're going to have to enter a code even if you don't share your account just in case or due to some error or other excuse when it becomes a PR problem, such as when Netflix bans a customer and cancels their account because boyfriend was trying to watch a movie while girlfriend was at work and didn't see the code on her phone until it was too late, which is also inevitably going to happen, and you're going to read a reddit thread about it that has a score of 35k and 10x gold and Netflix is going to formally apologize for the error and reinstate her account and then it is going to become par for the course after that. That's where this is going, bad UX all round because some middle management can make a bonus by cutting costs, or because Netflix's revenue is falling and they just don't want to admit the cause and refuse to correct the error, like IBM and every other failing company did.

> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...

Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway.

It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch, along with collaborative watching, which is a perk netflix does not have.

Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.

Free is the best price, especially for broke a college kid. It's too tempting to be honest. Streaming a torrent stops me from ever paying for a streaming service.

I'm actually proud to say I've never paid for a streaming service of any kind at all, or cable TV for that matter And I'm not a young kid. I've bought albums and VHS tapes and DVDs before. Rented movies. But never once paid for a subscription service of any kind. And I never will.

Of course I don't "consume content" (I hate that term, what's with PR and marketing people reducing everything to a business case?) so much anymore, so I'm not quite the pirate I once was. In all honesty, if I'm going to sit in front of a screen, I'd rather talk to people like you on the internet than watch the super strong american hero defeat the bad guy for the gazillionth time, except this time they are sure to remind me that I'm a bad bad man for some belief I have.

You could always legally pay. The price was quite high because you needed to pay for cable + premium channels in addition to renting at blockbuster video.

However with all the streaming services it's not just as high if not higher if you want everything. Not to mention the crazy Disney fee ($30+ / movie in addition to the monthly subscription). It's great as a DIS shareholder, but pretty terrible for their fans.

Netflix shuffles media constantly, you have to subscribe to five different streaming sites to watch a show and even then it could disappear next month, and you can't share the account with anyone else. To get good coverage of streaming services you need to subscribe to several.

Meanwhile in piracy land, you sign up to a seedbox, press a button to set up Plex+Sonarr/Radarr, then you're done. Type in the names of the things you want, share it with as many people as you want, etc. Literally all you have to bother with is disk usage and most of the sites I looked at last month had a minimum offering of 500GiB, some boasting 1TB of disk space -- so even that isn't much of a problem.

Streaming services (Netflix ($9) + Disney ($7ish) + Amazon ($13)): $27

A Randomly-chosen Popular Seedbox: $17.89/mo

That includes Plex + etc + 4TB Disk. One-button setup for all the supported services.

So like I said, all this measure does is drive people to piracy. They're literally faceplanting on their way to extract more and more money from people.

When was it not an option to pay for the content people are trying to sell you?

The problem was UX friction. You had to go to a video store, rent a movie, get ready to be raped with fees, or go to a library and hope they have it, or go to a second hand store and browse the selection. You had to have a special piece of hardware or ten, and if a movie you wanted to watch was on a format you didn't have, too bad. That's why people used to watch the same movies every so often. Watch a movie? Doesn't matter if we had seen it already. Let's watch it again anyway. This is how movies like The Big Lebowsky and Friday got their followings, people watching them repeatedly. Like music. This touches on the social impacts of the paid subscription model that is off topic so I won't delve into that.

And then Netflix changed everything. And then everyone else got in on the game, and now you've got worse UX friction than before. You've got to determine which service has the movie you want to watch. You've got to pay for that service, now it looks like per person, for just that movie. And if you want to watch 4 or 5 movies? You might have to have as many as 4 or 5 monthly subscriptions. Or you can rent it for 1.99. But buy it? No, you cannot buy it. I mean, you can, but who has a DVD player and space for a bunch of DVDs?

But tpb has all the movies. And you can own them. And they're all in one place. And as a bonus, they're free if you don't include your VPN service.

Side note, how is tpb different from a library exactly? Besides scale and efficiency, in principle, what's the difference between tpb and a library?

I feel like this is not true in regards to older material. Shows like wkrp in Cincinnati can never be made available with all of the music liceasing issues. Some classic shows like soap get censored. Some shows just go missing. Most never make it to streaming and many aren't available for purchasing.

Piracy is just as important. The reason why more don't is because it is easier to just pay and perhaps the content is not worth the effort anymore. People watch movies on fast forward now, play games on phones while watching and generally tv or movie viewing as a background activity.

The number wouldn't go up to $1200 - most of your family would get by just fine without Netflix because it simply isn't worth what it costs to them. The needle will move on Netflix's revenue and subscriber count, and their costs will slow down. And largely the people affected will forget about this.

The really fair way to price this is by concurrent viewers, independent of location, and they already have that feature. I too have my in-laws logged into my Disney+ account which they never use. But if they watch my kids, and my kids want to pick up where they left off on the Bluey episode, it's both my profile they need and my responsibility to pay for it.

I also have this use case and think it's really important. When I was a kid you could take a favorite VHS or DVD with you. Now you take your subscription. Sure, I guess you could take a phyusical authorized device (e.g. an iPad) with you, then screen cast it. But that requires grandma to figure out screen casting. And I'm trusting my kid with a $300 device instead of a $15 media artifact. Lame.

I'm actually curious if the physical device looks any more innocent in Netflix's future policies than straight-up credential sharing. It's still coming from a new IP.

If I have a Netflix account and I (post-pandemic) go to an ANB rental I would be pissed if my account didn't work there.

I subscribed the first month Netflix came to Denmark (my country) and I kept the subscription up for a decade until they started to degrade the stream too much. They fixed that and I eventually came back but stuff like that would turn me of for good.

Wow, I’ve never heard of Netflix having reduced the quality of their streaming. When did this start happening?

It will, because of cookies or a unique randomly generated app ID on installation.

> In the end, these streaming platforms are probably right that you shouldn't be allowed to share accounts if you don't live under the same roof

How many individual users are allowed on an account and whether they need to have any particular relationship (residential or otherwise) are completely arbitrary decisions.

And the alternative is what?

What is it that you think is appropriate for you to be pissed off about? You pay for Netflix for you and your household, not for anyone that happens to be related to you. Has that ever not been the case?

What exactly is Netflix pissed about ?

Their stock is over $500 a share.

In 2020 Netflix has positive cashflow of $1.9 billion.

What are they pissed about ?

Stock owners.

It's never enough

I won’t be shocked when they start introducing ads, reduced ads accounts, and premium content subscriptions.

Netflix's share price is ~80 times earnings. Their investors expect them to grow.

They have to grow.

Perhaps because they've doubled their streaming service's cost, reduced their content amount and availability, and are now properly warning they are going to be cracking down on geographically distant usage by users of the same account.

At this point I'm paying 20 USD/m for Netflix, roommate for HBOMax, friend's password (via reciprocal sharing) for Disney+, and our online TV service, which my elderly disabled mother can't go without.

The post-cable/satellite TV revolution has tripled my costs from what it used to be.

> geographically distant usage by users of the same account

But that's just it. A Netflix account isn't valid "for you and anyone you think it is". It's valid only for people in the same household. The thing they are cracking down on is people using the account in a way that they were never supposed to.

If your account is usable by 2 people of the same household and 1 moves out and continued paying half of of the Netflix bill... would you expect them to be booted out? So how does Netflix make a differentiation?

If that person moves out, they are no longer a part of that household.

I don't split my phone family plan when people leave the "household" - why would I do so for Netflix?

> The post-cable/satellite TV revolution has tripled my costs from what it used to be.

Huh. You must have had a really great deal on that nonspecific cable/satellite. Every time I’ve looked at TV packages since before streaming services even existed, it was $50/mo before various fees and at least $70 on the bill, just for basic cable.

Must've.

The Netflix plan I pay for allows two simultaneous views and permits different profiles. On what possible ground should it matter what physical location those two screens are viewed at?

> On what possible ground should it matter what physical location those two screens are viewed at?

On the terms of services.

"4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through the service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household."

I don't agree with it, and I do pay for two simultaneous screens, but that's how it is.

Hmm, I am not sure if that is even legal here in Europe, there are lots of rights in commercial contracts that I can't sign away. How I use a subscription may well be among them.

Not that it greatly matters. I don't share my Netflix account with anybody.

> You pay for Netflix for you and your household

What is a "household", and why do you think OP's purchase is related to that concept?

I pay Netflix for 4 concurrent streams. They never said I have to limit usage of one account to one household. I should be able to share the login with 100 of my friends and it will be fine since not more than 4 can watch at a time.

> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...

All subscription services must account for some form of average use. High usage customers are offset by low usage. Thus, it is likely with so many people on your account that others are subsidizing your account's usage.

Nevertheless, I don't think Netflix cares about your low usage family members, like your grandmother. They care about your high usage family and want to get them in their own account.

Netflix already has subscription tiers that varies the number of screens that can simultaneously watch or device downloads. Perhaps Netflix could help honest people be honest by creating tiers with modest increases for different households. Maybe $5 for each additional household?

I am sure they have discussed and don't yet have a great way of enforcing such. One option could be true "sub-accounts" where the sub-account pays for the bump of $5 with a credit card that must be tied to a different address?

From that use case, what is likely to happen is everyone having their own account but being more active in canceling and rejoining. I doubt Netflix revenue will increase to much above $240 in the end.

Probably, yeah. At least my grandparents and my mom would probably not get their own accounts.

Sorry but... For the 2 movies, can't she pay for only 2 months, presuming the recommendation is given in different months?

A movie ticket costs more than netflix. And i'm not a fan if subscriptions.

> Currently, they get approximately $240 per year from me and my family. If everyone has to create their own account, that number goes up to $1200.

Typo of extra zero? Is this US dollars?

The most expensive digital plan is 17.99 USD / month. With discs, few $ more.

USD 240/month is excessive.

> $240 per year from me and my family

per year

As others already pointed out, I wrote that it's per year.

But I quickly looked at it, the amounts I mentioned are even too low. Converted to USD, I pay $23 per month. So $276 for one person, or $1380 for my use-case.

Keep in mind that not everyone is from the US :)