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Comment by qeternity | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question to commenters that are poopooing this: why? Price hikes are annoying, and the content quality has been decaying recently, but those are separate issues.

Why shouldn’t Netflix seek to clamp down on account sharing? This seems to strike a nice balance that makes it easy to continue sharing, and not disrupt existing profiles, etc whilst charging a small premium for the privilege.

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People share their Netflix account because they don't think it's worth the full value and/or they're are financially strained.

If you raise the cost they will just leave, leaving Netflix with a total of $0 instead of a "small premium for the privilege" from them.

I suspect there are also people who share their account out of inertia. Some kids go off to college and stay on their parents’ account. Sometimes they don’t think about it since the password is stored on the app.

Also, Netflix might be losing money when people share their account and want to get to a place where the profit per account increases and then go from there.

> I suspect there are also people who share their account out of inertia.

This move is perfect for these situations. The kids get a discounted Netflix account without losing their account.

The kids want Disney+ anyway.

They’re not really separate issues. On some level we’re supporting a company vision and direction. Right now that direction says “we’re going to try and eek out every last dollar and we don’t care about the quality of our content”. I think this would be a different story if most of their energy was focused on creating a compelling product. “Look at all this great media were building as part of a completing vision and we have to raise prices to accommodate is a different narrative than “everything sucks and we don’t care give us more money”

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