An update to paid sharing

Family accounts are inherently blurry. There are families where someone moves out (e.g. a teenager graduates) or lives outside the home (e.g. Grandma's in a nursing home). Some groups of friends get together, call themselves a family, and pitch in for an account. Some families spent the summer in a cabin. Some people are away from home for more than 2 weeks at a time (traveling through many destinations). IDK how they support multiple profiles in a way that's fair to everyone.

I will say that Netflix hasn't added much value to my life over the past years. Most of my watching has either been with other people (e.g. going to a friend/family member's house and casting from my account), or on an airplane. My parents and my brother have profiles on my account - we live apart, but we're still a family.

My main motivator for keeping my Netflix subscription is not interrupting my family members when they do want to watch something. If Netflix starts charging per "house" that you login from, I'm canceling my account.

I pay for two streams; I'm going to use two streams however I please. If Netflix doesn't like it they can kick me off and I'll go back to pirating their content. Either way I'm not bothered.

This is so ridiculous. They already charge for screens, its clear and we all know it. The fact that now they want to limit where those screens are is purely a transparent money grab with no technological basis.

Its like they WANT people to hate them. They're the most expensive option already, if they can't make it work without extracting more value then they're 100% going to go under.

Here’s the summary stripped of the corporate BS:

“We used to scale simultaneous streaming with your Netflix plan tier. We now want you to give us more money for that feature, so we are going to gaslight you into thinking you were never supposed to share simultaneous streams with anyone but yourself. To do this, we will rename it a “homes” feature, and pretend the page you used to use to manage logins is new and justifies the price increase. But in reality, we can’t compete, we’ve already done as many explicit rate increases as our users will tolerate, and feel now is a good time to blame inflation for a blatant money grab.”

Uhoh, Netflix is in trouble. Lots of people are cancelling because they don't like the price, now their solution is to start cracking down and charging more. This will be a long slow decline where competition fights its way in.

The hard part for corporations to understand and get behind, is cheap is better, coming in at a very low prices picks up lots of people and goodwill, and starves competition.

Netflix used to be the example of low price for great value.

I canceled when they last raised prices. So far I haven't heard anything that would bring me back.

I did not share my password and Generally only watched on one screen. I'm sure they can tell. But they just kept jacking the prices up while lots of content went to other streaming services. The Balkanization of TV content.

> Travel included: You can watch while outside the home on your tablet, laptop or mobile.

So what can't you do, exactly? Can you plug these devices into a TV? Can you not access your account on a TV or Roku/etc. device?

What if you are at an Airbnb somewhere — can you log into their TV and use it there?

If a kid splits time between his mom's house and his dad's house, does he have to designate one house as his home and the other as "travel" (and have usage restricted there, in whatever way it is restricted)?

If I can’t use my Netflix subscription (on a TV) when staying in an AirBnb or similar when traveling, I’ll just cancel it. This seems to be such a straightforward use case that I can’t believe they’ll risk angering their customers over this.

If I visit my in-laws house for a few days, which is a common occurrence, am I unable to watch my Netflix account on one of their TVs? It sounds like I would be restricted to only mobile devices.

What's the breakdown of complainers? Is it mostly paying subscribers who intend to cancel because their parents can't watch for free? Or is it mostly non paying viewers who will do nothing as their parents continue to pay for a subscription they no longer access?

Literally the only thing stopping me from cancelling Netflix is that I'd be cutting off my sister. If they do that for me, I'm out. Their catalog is pitiful and their new content is so often so terrible it's become a meme. The saddest thing is that there's really innovative projects that will suffer without their funding. Like Love Death and Robots. But even in interviews they say it's unsustainable.

My family shares a 4 streams account. We all live in different countries. There is not 1 "home". On top of that I regularly move from 1 country to another so where does that leave me?

If the concept of "home" becomes a problem, then I'll be going back to pirating content.

You choice Netflix, you can choose to make the life of your users harder or you can back off and leave the paying subscribers in peace!

One thing is for sure is that if and when I stop paying for Netflix, I won't be back so it'll be net loss for them.

It's fascinating, watching them point the gun at their own foot and slowly pull the trigger.

What if they went the other way, reduced the price and lowered restrictions to the point where, in a world with numerous alternatives, people keep their service simply because it's inexpensive?

Because what they're doing now isn't going to work (for me).

This seems like a reasonable middle ground. I'm almost embarrassed at the number of people sharing my password.

I hope Netflix can survive their dwindling subscriber growth. They were the ones who kicked off the streaming era, and they've continually put out great original content. They've certainly made some missteps (cancelling great series and overpaying for content) but TV would be worse without them.

For comparison, and hoping that netflix doesn't devolve to that point, I submit Spotify. My wife and I have the "2 people" plan. But it is draconian that only one device be used at a time. So if I'm listening and my wife starts the car, my shower/work tunes shut off. The car doesn't have multiple profiles. Similar happens if she is in the kitchen and starts tunes via voice (bluetooth from her phone understands it is a different profile).

To be fair, Google Play has similar draconian limitations. I assume this is part of their agreement with the music industrial complex.

Did everyone here who is complaining miss that part of TFA:

> Members on the Basic plan can add one extra home, Standard up to two extra, and Premium up to three extra

If you're on the Premium tier, 4 simultaneous streams, you get 4 "homes" to share it with. It seems that you get the same amount of homes as streams.

I find that perfectly reasonable. Netflix are in a tough spot and need to continue producing content, which requires money. They don't have Disney's money, so it's either increased prices/tightened sharing rules, or a downward spiral.

Comments here made me realize I waste too much time browsing Netflix and saving things to watch later but never actually watching anything so I just deleted my profile.

My wife still watches it occasionally but she hates their interface. Lots of things pop up that she finds disturbing and there's no way to tell it "never show me this again!".

I'll leave it to her to decide if it's worth it to keep our subscription but in the words of Mr. Collins, I've got better things to do with my time. I really don't care any more.

I don’t fully disagree with what they’re doing, but how they’re doing it is stupid.

The 4K plan can do what - 4 streams at once for ~$20? They just raised prices on that. Instead, they should make every plan one or two streams and actually lower the base price. They could then do ala carte add on streams.

That would let them tackle the issue while at least being able to spin the PR.

Either way, we cancelled. $20 a month is a ridiculous price compared to other services. If they want to be a premium service they need to get or make some more premium content.

I'm going to buck the trend here and say I might try subscribing for a little bit to see if it's worth the cost.

My parents have been Netflix subscribers since before they did streaming, and I've never paid a dime for Netflix (though I've been subscribed to Prime for a few years, and have tried other subscription streaming services in the past).

Netflix is probably 40-70% of my legal streaming though (though IIRC it's also a little bit more expensive than Prime, which also offers free shipping, so it's not a direct comparison).

I'm in my late 30s now and living in a different country than my parents. Is it easy to be outraged that they're cutting off access to something that has been free (for me) for over a decade? Sure. But emotion aside, it might honestly just be time to consider subscribing and seeing how much it costs, and give it a cost-benefit analysis on its own merits (past usage terms aside). If I decide against it, I'm really just out of the cost of a few months, and realistically its brought more value to me over the last 10 years than it could reasonably cost in a few months.

I do want Netflix to survive because they really did validate the idea of streaming for all the services they're now competing with.

widespread account sharing between households undermines our ability to spend 17b a year on bridgerton clones and report it as 5 billion on our 10-k

It would be an amazing act of caste system creation if they subsidized the major markets by charging only smaller markets paid sharing from now on. I mean how much more obvious is it that they know this is a bad move?

I predict a massive backfire on this one.. I know Netflix is struggling but as competitors (see HBOMax) get better and better now is not the time to both raise prices and give people a reason to revisit their active subscription. I know plenty of people who only continue to pay for Netflix because they share it with a bunch of people. They don’t really have any killer content right now and as far as I can tell no streaming service has figured out how to deal with people who just cycle between services… This is not the right problem to focus on right now.

I'd be easier to understand if it was just back to 'single screen' accounts, no simultaneous viewing on the one account though fuzzy ideas of families and houses.

For those of us who don't live in those markets, how does this $2.99 compare with a new subscription? Like I get people will pay $2.99 extra for additional homes, but how much cheaper (if at all) is this compared to me getting a new plan? What will this look like when this model inevitably comes to other markets? I'm guessing subscriptions in Argentina is vastly cheaper than say the UK or US.

So they're reporting earnings tomorrow, and they chose to release this news update today. Is it to signal that their initial 'test' of these fees was a success, and now they're rolling it out more broadly?

Or is it because they have lousy results to announce, and they want analysts to see that they'll be improving their margins (among people who don't bail, that is) with these new fees?

Netflix won over piracy because it was cheap and had a lot of shows that most people wanted to see. Watch them literally reverse both of those things - make it harder and pricier to use a legal service, and mostly have shitty dramas with one or two hits a year - and try to guess what will happen!

I guess I come out ahead with this. I currently have the $19.99/month plan to cover my family in my house and my mom in her house. I guess I can downgrade the plan to the $15.49/month and spend $3 to add a home, so I'll save $1.50/month.

Here's the thing, i probably use netflix 1h a day at a minimum but this is really outrageous. I mainly have netflix to watch shows while driving to work and for my parents and my little siblings, otherwise i wouldve already canceled.

Netflix's content quality has gone down significantly in the past few years, while at the same time increasing in price. I can't see how this wouldn't just result in a very large amount of cancelled accounts.

> An Update to Paid Sharing

Oh, a title like this is never good news...

Netflix, as an employer, is apparently very much of the mind that they're not a family but a team, and if you're not contributing to the success of the team, you're cut. And I mean, every corporation is that, but Netflix is loud and proud about that. Or so I'm lead to believe.

With that said, I guess they shouldn't be surprised if their once-loyal customers tell them to pound sand because they're no longer a good value versus the new game in town.

Why is this (and the previous functionality) being rolled out seemingly exclusively in Latin American countries?

Netflix is facing an existential threat: they own basically no durable, quality content licenses. Their early streaming ascendancy was finally eclipsed by the logical conclusion of... each and every content owner building their own competing streaming service, and removing the content from Netflix. So Netflix, which used to be this phenomenal value where, for one $15 or so/mo fee, you could watch a _ton_ of the shows you loved, along with some of their new and interesting original content... now just has... that new and a lot of times not interesting original content.

Being able to obviously read the tea leaves, they started investing insane gobs of money: $17 billion on content in FY21, $18B this year. (It's not clear to me what the breakdown is of that amount on original content vs licensed content.)

But content is all they have. It's all they _can_ have. It's all any of these streaming services can have, but the rest are not purely streaming businesses. Disney is going to spend $33B this year (though $11B of that is sports rights via ESPN). And Disney has... the entire Disney catalog, as well as Marvel AND Star Wars, analogs to which Netflix has precisely zero of. (Disney doesn't even anticipate + being profitable until 2024 at earliest, which is really saying something.)

So it becomes a question of, can you make it back on volume? Can you outrun the giant boulder? And more importantly, is there anything about Netflix that positions them to manage this risk better than any of their competitors? HBOMax has the WB portfolio AND HBO portfolio. Disney is Disney. Peacock is attached to a cable/internet conglomerate and television studio.

I genuinely don't know if their way out here is to keep throwing $20M per special to the likes of Dave Chappell and Louis CK. Investments like Stranger Things feel like a better ROI, especially once you know you have a following, and arguably no one has better data insight than Netflix but I think content costs have spiraled, Netflix is temperamental and sometimes cancels fan favorite series, and sometimes funds series' that make no sense or are effectively obviously clickbait ("How to Build A Sex Room", "Too Hot to Handle", what is this, Cinemax?)

But then, they stumble on the odd mega-hit, like Tiger King or Squid Game or Bridgerton or The Crown. Not even odd hits, then. They do produce hits, and good content. But the question is, is the model itself sustainable? Can you be a pure streaming studio, where your subscriber base outpaces your content and tech costs? That's been the case historically; they've been profitable. But more and more, people are consolidating accounts, leaving after bingeing the few shows they care about, and abandoning Netflix, and Netflix doesn't have a capacious room of other business models they're attached to.

And people are weird creatures. There are plenty of people who consider immediate access to Friends or The Office to be deeply compelling reasons _alone_ to maintain their HBO or Peacock subscription. We know that because Netflix paid $100M for a single additional year of Friends _alone_. And literally $500 MILLION dollars for 5 years of Seinfeld. What's it say about the model that they know that it's worth it to pay half a billion dollars on a single property for all of five years, domestic only? Woof.

What's with the country list? Seems like a weird choice.

I don't understand the anti-Netflix hate. If you don't like their catalog, you have lots of options.

Password sharing is the rampant default. It's not just grandma in the home or your daughter at college. It's your friends, your exes, your old housemates. Netflix has been, IMO, remarkably chill about this for a very long time. Y'all are talking like they are audaciously stealing something you believe that you are owed.

I think that what got lost along the way is that Netflix forgot what their real product innovation was: long-tail convenience. Whether being able to order from a massive catalog of DVDs or stream things in hi-def without having to worry about torrents or FTP servers, Netflix really changed the way we access media.

They've also played a massive role in popularizing alternative comedy to the masses. Same with documentaries, to a different degree.

I do think they've made some questionable content production decisions. It's highly likely that if they'd stuck to financing comedy specials, documentaries and bringing back shows like Arrested Development and Firefly, they might not have scared Disney, Amazon, HBO and Hulu into competing with them. Their greed made it impossible for the incumbents to not compete.

The hype for Netflix stock was based on them becoming the Spotify of video and a tech advantage in streaming. It became clear a while ago that the studios wouldn't allow this and they no longer have a tech advantage. The market is finally adjusting their stock to match reality.

Now they are fighting a battle they can't win. HBO, Disney, etc. have huge back catalogs that immediately makes their streaming services more valuable, in addition to all the new content they make.

They shouldn't have given up so quickly on physical media. Physical media does not have the licensing issues. They could've invested heavily like the way Amazon did on lowering delivery time. Maybe they could've gotten physical media delivery down to one hour or same day. This would counter the studios back catalog because while Disney can instantly stream their back catalog, it's only Disney. Netflix would have access to back catalogs of all studios (at the tradeoff of waiting for the physical media) That's a tradeoff that many customers would make (access to more back catalog diversity in exchange for the delay of waiting for disks).

At the same time, they could produce streaming content with a different business model. How many times do customers complain about favorite shows getting canceled after a season? What if there was a way for customers to select which shows they want supported? Like pick your top five every month and your subscription money will go to that show.

Instead, they went the route of just spending a lot of money making new content as if they're a studio. But they can't beat the studios at being a studio, Disney and the others are the best at that.

> Over the last 15 years, we’ve worked hard to build a streaming service that’s easy to use, including for people who travel or live together. It’s great that our members love Netflix movies and TV shows so much they want to share them more broadly. But today’s widespread account sharing between households undermines our long term ability to invest in and improve our service.

> We value our members, and recognize that they have many entertainment choices. So we’re working hard to make great TV shows and films, and to be as thoughtful as possible about how we charge for use across multiple homes. We will be notifying members in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala by email and on Netflix. For more information, visit our help center.

After reading the first ten words of these paragraphs, it's obvious you don't need to read any further. Might be fun to make an AI that strips out junk/corporate filler.

First we payed for screens, now we need to pay for homes, then what?

What will they invent to take more money from us?

Interesting how companies invent new ways to take our money as consumers and also invent new ways to pay us less money as employees.

I won't give my money to them.