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Comment by misc213 | Hacker News Reader

How about a consumer protection bill that refunds your monthly streaming service fee if you didn't stream during the billing period

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Someone should make a service to do this. I'll give the service may payment info, and then I want to have to click one button each month to turn on each service. If I haven't watched Netflix for awhile, it automatically turns off when the month expires. If I decide to watch Netflix, but it's already turned off, I click one button and it's back.

You can already do this, you just have to do it yourself with a bunch of clicks.

Why should that be a consumer protection bill?

No one is compelling you to pay for a streaming service. In fact there are many ways to pay per-show/movie if you prefer that model, which range from a short term digital "rental" to physically owning a disc.

Applying this to other monthly costs is also an interesting exercise: If I don't just my gym membership, do I get that back? If my house doesn't burn down, should I get a refund on my fire insurance?

I think I disagree with this. There's a cost to keeping the lights on and that's part of the subscription. If you don't use any electricity, your provider still bills you for the $30 to maintain the power grid.

It's not my responsibility to keep Netflix's lights on if I'm not using it.

But you have the option to use it by maintaining the subscription. It had to be available any moment during the month you could choose to login and watch something. Someone had to keep the servers on, the content network, the authentication service when you logged in, etc.

That's fair, you paid for the ability to watch Netflix any time during the month, and whether or not you actually do, the ability to do so was was given.

Was it, though? What if there was an outage when you wanted to watch?

I think this is a great idea. Similarly ISPs should detect if they don't receive any packets from your connections for any 24 hour period, and refund you for that day.

That only makes sense if you pay double for using double the packets on another day

Not even. During the process and confusion caused by changing the pricing rubric, they'll make sure that you're paying more than you were paying before.

It would be pointless because close to 0% of customers have a single day where they don't transfer any data.

Well, customers who take holidays would have days when they don't transfer any data (assuming they turn off their router/modem while they're away) and customers whose connection is broken because of faulty ISP equipment would also benefit (because there would be financial incentive for the ISPs to fix the problem, rather than it helping their bottom line).

Still doesn't really make sense because the ISP still incurs the same expense. They had to buy that capacity which still exists while you are taking a short holiday. If its a long holiday you can cancel the service for that time.

If your service doesn't work for a significant period, you likely can receive some compensation enforced by a government body.

Who is downvoting this? Please share your opinion

I didn't downvote it, but I would imagine that it is a case of consumers needing to take responsibility for their own actions at some point.

Keep in mind that streaming services are sold as a reoccurring monthly service, it is remarkably easy to cancel service, and they fulfill the full month even if you cancel early. It is difficult to regard the those business practices as deceptive. (At least in the case of services that I have subscribed to.) This is very much unlike the horror stories that I have heard of for other subscription services, and have experienced in a couple of cases.

I didn't downvote but streaming services could argue that they're paying for on-demand capacity that has to be available for all paying customers who could decide to stream at any moment in time during their subscription.

On a personal level I also think there's paradoxical social net negatives from overly-insulating people from their own poor decisions while in tandem raising barriers to entry for services (basically, why I choose not to live in California).

This is unrelated to the topic of this thread.

1. You're paying a subscription fee for _access_. It's irrelevant if you use the product.

2. It's insane to want the government to "protect" you from … not using Netflix. You seriously think it's okay for the government to force this?

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