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Comment by Spartan-S63 | Hacker News Reader

Netflix is a cautionary tale of Wall Street growth-at-all-costs mixed with Silicon Valley hyperoptimization. Their tendency to cancel popular shows because they become more expensive to produce doesn't bode well for their value proposition.

Compared to the other streaming services, Netflix will get dropped long before even Apple TV+ in my household. Adding ad-supported tiers is fine, they just better never add ads to the current paid tiers. Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying. They already limit the simultaneous streams and that seems fair. They shouldn't be wasting time and effort figuring out if logins are coming from different households.

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>Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying.

this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?

using your logic we might as well just have 1 account and share it with every single person on the planet.

the only reason that netflix is getting flack for it is because they were super lax with it for such a long time and now everyone feels entitled to it for some insane reason.

> this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?

Does any of those services have "multiple simultaneous streams" plans? I'm paying Netflix for 4 simultaneous streams (their naming: "Number of screens you can watch on at the same time") and they should not care where I utilize their offer.

Nope, you’re paying Netflix for a single household license with up to 4 simultaneous streams.

You’re too fixated on this stream limit. It’s not the only limit of the contract, even if you wish that was the case.

The household license is dumb and customers are reacting to such dumbness by canceling and shutting down the company.

Any proof at all that customers are reacting this way? HN and Reddit being edgy doesn’t count

I mean me personally I won’t pay as much anymore when they enforce it, I pay it for my parents that live in another state and I only watch their large tent pole shows a couple times a year.

Rather than paying for the whole year I’ll pay for a month or two like I do with paramount+ and Disney+.

I’m sure they did some financial calculus to see what’s better but it’s not like other companies haven’t made terrible decisions in the past killing their business. I’m sure blockbuster had bean counters justifying their choices too.

> The household license is dumb and customers are reacting to such dumbness by canceling and shutting down the company.

Customers aren't reacting because it hasn't happened yet outside of a few tiny test countries.

Excluding no longer being able to do business in Russia for sanctions purposes, Netflix gained subscribers rather than losing them last quarter.

I doubt they’ll be shutting down.

How does that work really though?

4 streams simultaneously could all be from different locations, even different countries and still be a household subscription.

One watches at work, another family member is on holidays abroad, the other watches at home and the other via mobile Internet on a train. Should this considered password sharing?

> Number of screens you can watch on at the same time

You. Not your neighbor. Not your friends.

Strictly by the sentence you quote to make your point, you would not even be allowed to share your "simultaneous streams" with members of your household. Which makes this quote rather useless to argue for your assumed right of sharing your streams with anyone you want.

My assumption comes from Netflix praising password sharing[1]. I think they didn't mean sharing password with myself.

[1] https://nitter.net/netflix/status/840276073040371712

Does that also mean all household members should be in the same house while watching? Kinda defeats the purpose of their mobile apps.

I honestly don’t understand why so many people are up in arms about a company enforcing their contract.

If you bought a sort of “family pass” to a movie theater that allowed your family to watch unlimited movies, you wouldn’t expect to be able to pass the family pass around to other families.

Netflix is literally just the digital version of a family pass to a movie theater. Everything is priced according to models of single households using single accounts, down to the licensing costs and royalties.

I don't see anyone up in arms here, he just pointed it's enough reason to cancel Netflix and he is perfectly right, same as they have right to enforce their contract. You don't like them going strict on account sharing, cancel account, it's your right.

The value proposition doesn't make sense to a lot of people any more. Also, a lot of people are facing rising costs/losing jobs, etc. so it's one more thing threatening their way of life.

Not to mention some families are fairly distributed and any tech savvy person has many viable alternatives.

Using your logic, anyone loaning out a book they own should be criminally charged.

This line of thinking leads to the ludicrous existing patents that describe scanning the room to check how many people are in a room and once crossed a certain threshold, the movie or show automatically stops airing.

Isn't the difference very clear here: Subscription vs Ownership

If you are paid member of a library, and the library has ToS which does not allow you to lend your book to anyone else, then yes you are at fault when you share.

"Using your logic, anyone loaning out a book they own should be criminally charged."

Oh you better believe that if this was possible to do with physical books, it would be done.

The only reason this isn't much of a thing with ebooks is that if you use the bigger ebook services you don't really own the books in the first place.

If you take a book, start photocopying it and giving away the copies you may well be.

There are limits even there.

I agree with you and they have a right to do this; issue is; they will lose a lot of members because of this because they were so lax. That’s why it’s is common to think; it is easier to start high and discount than start low and increase your prices. People don’t like change and will just leave.

I also see how this is hard to make fair for edge cases; it should just be clear what it means. I think 1 geo location at a time for x screens is clear. One household is not clear; if my wife is travelling for her job and my son too while I stay at home: how does that work? Are they going to time the ‘remote’ watching for what a typical vacation or work outing might look like?

Anyway; instead of clamping down on password sharing, why not add tiers based on number of geo locations with those screens? 4 screens in 2 locations, 4 screens in 3 locations, 4 screens in 4 locations and that’s it. These locations are not fixed, but this is easy to measure and enforce for them, while, as my situation above, is less obvious.

I think making it clear what is allowed and what is not from the start in verifiable terms, is important or users will get angry as they seem to be now.

> I agree with you and they have a right to do this; issue is; they will lose a lot of members because of this because they were so lax. That’s why it’s is common to think; it is easier to start high and discount than start low and increase your prices. People don’t like change and will just leave.

I think they will gain a lot of members that way too, since people get used and attached to a service and now need their own accounts.

Eh, maybe a few years ago when they were still releasing critically acclaimed shows left and right and not canceling them after season 2 all while not having the streaming market be mobbed by multiple competitors who also happen to stop licensing content to Netflix at the same time.

Netflix's problem was to cut quality to control costs _before_ they raised prices. If they had raised these prices while they were still the ascendant service I'm sure you are right and people would have grumbled while ultimately signing up. Then they could have cut costs slowly and most of their customers would not have noticed the boiling of the frog. As it stands they are driving their customers away at the exact moment that their competitors have finally gotten their house in order and opened their arms to Netflix's client base.

Like look at just AppleTV and HBOMax. AppleTV is dumping a massive amount of money into the aesthetics. Even the screensaver on the machine is this beautiful 4k resolution photos of landscapes, all while they are obviously not skimping on writes. HBO has been in the quality tv space for longer than Netflix has produced content _and_ has paired with Adult Swim(a channel that is unique enough in content to drive people to pay for packages just to get it, much like sports in the past) to get all their content. Both of these are cheaper than what Netflix is proposing as their monthly costs.

I'm not sure why Netflix thinks people will accept a more expensive, and worse product in the face of this competition

> One household is not clear; if my wife is travelling for her job and my son too while I stay at home: how does that work?

Does nobody here pay tax? Household has a pretty clear meaning, people ordinarily resident overnight in the same household.

Spotify has the same restriction, and uses ML to enforce it to some extent, and nobody using the service legitimately has any issues.

Customers are entitled to feel entitled.

Steam has family sharing.

so does Netflix?

> Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying.

This mindset is baffling. The contract was always that a subscription was for a single household. The fact that they were flexible about access for many years is irrelevant.

You’re not buying the right to share (or resell) your account to whoever you want. You’re buying the right to stream within a single household. It doesn’t make sense to get so upset when they simply hint at enforcing the agreed-upon terms of the contract more actively.

The OP did address that though, via the fact that you can only have X number of simultaneous streams. That's a sensible, easily enforced limit.

Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?

If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.

That's what I found irritating about youtubeTV. the media companies must be really giving youtube a hard time because I found it a pain in the ass to use while traveling and when I was subscribed at an earlier point it wasn't that bad.

> The OP did address that though, via the fact that you can only have X number of simultaneous streams.

I feel like everyone is forgetting that Netflix is licensing content, not just selling access to streaming bandwidth.

The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households, not the idea that a single login can be used infinitely by as many people as long as an arbitrary simultaneous stream limit is enforced.

> Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?

Several streaming services already have mechanisms to check account sharing. It’s not new. There’s no indication that Netflix plans to go full draconian and limit to a single IP with zero flexibility, despite what people here seem to be assuming. The account sharing detection logic used in other platforms is quite forgiving, and honestly it’s not terribly difficult to detect long-term patterns where two separate locations are constantly using the same account with users never returning “home”.

>The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households

Content licensing is based on whatever imaginary rules you want to make up. The OP is providing a plausible line of reasoning where you can marry this stupidity with something quantifiable (i.e., streams). That sounds quite reasonable. Ultimately, it's their service. They can do whatever they want. As for why the OP is bothering, I can only guess that netflix has built the reputation of being a tech company and the OP thinks that they may show some internal consistency. Otherwise, media companies make up rules all the time (for eg., no sports in your local area).

They introduced this idea that you're paying for a certain amount of concurrent streams, it's not that surprising that people see password sharing as a fair way of getting your money's worth rather than taking advantage.

The initial premise seems slightly manipulative to me I guess, if you paid by the hour or something, no password sharing problem but less profits

> If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.

They are likely to err on the side of caution. Spotify already does this, on the same restriction, and it is a complete non-issue.

> Single household opens up a whole can of worms.

It really doesn't. Do you live in the same house? Then you're covered. And there's lots you can feed in to a ML model to catch out people who have devices that have literally never appeared together in the same household to spot suspicious activity and, for instance, for 2FA.

If that just stops people reselling accounts to strangers in different countries alone that's a significant win for Netflix.

Netflix ought to be delighted that people are paying and sharing their passwords with family. Because the alternative is not paying at all, which is what is going to happen!

Why would the primary account holder cancel their account if their friends can't watch for free?

Some of my friends went halfsies on an ad-free hulu account they share.

I don’t spend enough on amazon to have a prime account for myself, but am happy to pay for it since my close family members use it enough to make the subscription worthwhile. If they were to stop using it, or amazon limits the address they ship to, I would cancel.

If you ran a business and it cost $10 per month and I signed up. Then shared my password to all my friends and family. People who don’t live with me. Would you be ok because it shouldn’t matter what I do with my account as long as I pay?

They implicitly allowed it for well over a decade because it was good for their growth. We had a friends group with multiple Wiis using the same Netflix account when I was in college.

Microsoft implicitly allowed pirating Windows for over a decade, and for the same reason. Eventually they switched to an activation model when there was no growth left, just squeezing more out of the same userbase.

This is not a new trick.

Even explicitly: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_sr...

If I had some equivalent of the Netflix very limited concurrent streams leverage, yes.

Also, they encouraged it, and not in a wink/wink way...explicitly: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_sr...

It really feels like you should be paying for streams, not where you are streaming to. Max out your 4-streams at a time? Well, then, pay more. Seems fair.

This sound like a good idea, I like it

I think Netflix is coming out as the bad guy here, but it's the whole industry that is broken. They seem to expect every single household to subscribe to 10 different streaming services. This obviously creates a market for password sharing, and I suspect it will bring a resurgence to piracy.

Just as a personal anecdote: I have Netflix, Paramount, HBO Max, TV2 Play, Paramount, Viaplay, Discovery+ and Disney+. And probably some that I'm forgetting. I don't really watch that much TV, and the only way I could justify this was by sharing the accounts with close family. The problem is that we're not in the same household. The moment this stops being a viable option we're likely just going to cancel the subscriptions. You can rent a lot of movies for $150/month.

The amount of subscription services are getting out of hand. Even my car has one, and the only value proposition it provides me is not having to connect my phone as a hotspot (which is kind of pain with an iPhone) and real-time traffic data. For $15/month.

> You can rent a lot of movies for $150/month.

So do it. It takes seconds to cancel and subscribe. If you want access to everything all at once, then pay $150 per month. If you cannot afford $150 per month, then spend an extra minute or two per month canceling and subscribing.

I find it to be very convenient, and more convenient than it has ever been in my life.

> They seem to expect every single household to subscribe to 10 different streaming services.

Oh absolutely, it's frustrating. And whats even more frustrating is that some of those services refuse to have their content on other services but don't provide their service outside of the US.

I wanted to watch Dragon Ball Z last week. It's on Funamation and AnimeLab. Well neither of those services are available in Taiwan, so, only option is to pirate it.

I want to watch Star Trek - Strange New World. Not available on any service in Taiwan.

So I pay for Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, and PrimeVideo.

HBO is available in Taiwan but you need Taiwan credit card... so I can't register with my Singapore card. Paramount, Hulu, not available here.

Sometimes I dont mind paying for these services but they don't want my money.

But at the same time I'm paying for 4, I don't want to pay for 10.

We are at the point of the priacy hat meme.

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/bcdlbf/hello_old_fr...

I am waiting for cable companies to resurface. Brokers that package a bunch of services together selling a single bundle to the end consumer and negotiating upstream with the many content providers.

I sign up for 2 concurrent streams, then upgrade to 4 concurrent streams. My kids move out and now with the same account they tell me I can only use 1 stream in my 4 stream package...

Netflix licenses and resells content not streams.

I think a lot of people in this thread are too fixated on the idea of “streams” and they have lost the plot. Netflix is a content producer and licensor. The streams are just a means to deliver that content.

That sounds like a netflix problem.

They advertise it in terms of streams. Whatever business arrangements they have with their providers is irrelavent to me as a consumer.

It'd be like if you went to an all you can eat buffet, and people started saying its not fair if you eat too much because the grocery store is charging the resturant per item not per person. It is totally irrelavent ti the person eating at the resturant.

Its a business arrangement. If either side is unhappy they are allowed to terminate it.

That said, very openly turning a blind eye to something and then suddenly not is essentially unilaterally altering the terms of the deal. If i ran a business and suddenly changed the pricing scheme, that's my right, but i would understand if x% decided the value proposition no longer made sense and left. I certainly wouldn't be offended - its just business.

Netflix is a cautionary tale of the “DropBox Problem”. Streaming is a feature not a product. All of Netflix’s competitors consider streaming video as one channel for their content along with over the air, video on demand, theaters, etc.

Apple and Amazon just want to make their bundle more attractive.

I think you are correct. The one thing I would add is that the hyperoptimization is not really appreciated.

From my vantage point as a customer and observer, they are a company that really had first mover advantage with a quality client anywhere. But the experience stagnated and the focus of the company flipped to consuming/wasting as much time as possible. IMO they got fat and happy when the main competitor was Amazon Prime Video, which is a flawed service in many ways.

Now there are competitors who are really good. Disney+ is a superior experience (on Apple TV, anyway) with a better catalog and better features like search. Peacock is pretty good too.

They had first mover advantage when it came to streaming video on-demand. They did see the writing on the wall that they needed their own catalog, but I think they hyperoptimized for quantity over quality. Netflix has a deep bench of originals, but so few are actually really good. Compare and contrast that with a service like Apple TV+. They have a smaller catalog, but their content, to me, is typically higher quality (Ted Lasso is a standout, For All Mankind is spectacular, etc).

They lost the plot when they decided they couldn't just be a distributor but also a creator. They went too hard too fast and they don't have compelling content.

Agreed - and it's worse than that. The user-hostile environment makes it impossible to see the actual catalog. I routinely learn about potentially interesting shows from things that aren't Netflix.

The Disney+ model is so much better. They suggest stuff, but I can wander and discover in the library of thousands of Disney titles if I so desire.

I've been a Netflix customer for 20 years. I have two residences in separate states and occasionally someone else will stay at one and use my Netflix. If they ever flag my account for simultaneous streaming that will be the last straw.

I don't see how pissing off paying customers will increase revenue. Netflix needs to figure out how to make content to keep the current ones.

I have been a Netflix customer since the DVD-only days. My wife & me watch a show in the living room, while my son gets his weekend allowance to watch a cartoon in the bedroom. This used to work fine, until Netflix decided we can’t play two streams like this. There were other reasons to cancel, but this made the decision easier.

Netflix is not a cautionary tail for anything in the overall context.

Almost all companies over-expand the way they did, and almost all companies are feeling the shock of the economic downturn.

They have every right to crack down on password sharing. The fact that people think they are a bad actor for this is evidence of the total lack of moral compass in our society today.

I mean if a popular show is expensive enough that it doesn't make financial sense, I'd say it should probably be canceled.

> Furthermore, cracking down on password sharing is reason enough to cancel - it shouldn't matter what I do with my account as long as I'm paying

This summer, YC is funding a news service that only has 1 subscriber by design - the login is shared worldwide. Database architecture was dead simple and can scale easily to other planets. Cost of the subscription is pegged to the GDP of the Earth so profitability is not an issue.

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