Netflix: Love is sharing a password (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Netflix: Love is sharing a password (2017)

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82 pointselashri39 comments

I never understood the password sharing problem. You can have max 4 streams at a time. And people are paying for it. What they do with it is not a concern for Netflix.

They need to either change it to a different unlimited streams but 1 location plan, or create a new higher tier stream anywhere but Max 4 plan

The reason is they want to bundle stream quality to stream quantity to keep squeezing subscription money for features you don't use. I share my account because 4k streaming is locked behind their Premium tier, 4 simultaneous stream account. I pay double the price in order to get 4k streaming. If they don't want me to share my account, I'd be happy with a 4k quality, 1 stream quantity account, at a lower price. They don't want to do that. When they keep the pricing the same and now try to charge me for account sharing, I'll just cancel.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

Ah, bundling shenanigans, just like the cable companies. Although I guess Netflix became a cable company the minute they started doing streaming: same business model as HBO, just over the Internet. But now they're no longer special in that regard.

I'm actually concerned with Netflix interest in "password sharing".

We have the 4 stream account for myself and my 3 kids. They are all in University and so they dont live at home during most of the school year.

The kids "legal" address is my house, but they login from their school's networks.

Is this "unfair sharing"?

Netflix has the concept of a "Netflix household".

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/124925

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think "legal" address bears any weight here. According to the Netflix definition, they would likely consider your kids to not be part of the same "Netflix household" as you.

Also why are they even encouraging password sharing? Spotify family plan model makes much more sense, each member of the family plan has their own account with separate login. No more risks of oversharing the password or wondering who changed something.

I agree with you that the Spotify (and Apple family plan) approach usually make the most sense—the big difference between the models is the device that they’re utilized on. A phone and a laptop is generally a personal device, whereas a TV is shared.

I get that you can login to Netflix on a laptop or a personal device, but the platform lends itself to lean into a larger medium, like a TV, which may explain why they’ve chosen this model.

> Spotify family plan model makes much more sense, each member of the family plan has their own account with separate login

My wife and I have two kids, a nine year old and a four year old. Under that model, I’d have to sign in four times (per a streaming service) to set up a new TV (or other shared device.) No thanks.

That is interesting and I wonder how you prevent password sharing.

What comes to mind is using Google / Fb accounts for sign in instead of a separate Netflix sign-in. Whenever it's the former, I won't share with others but the latter I have no issues sharing since it's a single use account.

> That is interesting and I wonder how you prevent password sharing.

I think the Spotify example above is the correct model here: you'll never "prevent" password sharing so long as passwords are easily shared. (Even the idea of trying to use Google or Facebook accounts is just externalizing how easily the passwords are shared to a third party. There's still plenty of shared/group Google and Facebook accounts around.)

But what the Spotify example (among others now too) show is that you can incentivize people to use their own individual accounts by making it easier to accounts to band together in billing cycles as a group (or family) and making that bundling convenient and cheap enough that they prefer it to account sharing. (Plenty of people still share Spotify accounts, but it is certainly far fewer than if they didn't have such a strong family plan option that encourages people to use individual accounts.)

Agreed, my wife and I have shared a single Spotify account since forever: I would just “offline” playlists and then block network access to Spotify. But now that their family plans are well priced and our kid is starting to want to use Spotify we’ll be getting a family plan soon.

They don't want to prevent password sharing - they want to prevent account sharing. The reason they sell you four streams is so that everyone in your household can watch.

Just make the maximum number of profiles and max concurrent streams(screens) one.

Sure people could share a password but they also share watch history, progress in episodes and so on.

If the average shared user has at least two other stream subscriptions, the likelihood of them using Netflix the same time as 3 others is slim.

It’s not uncommon to have 2 kids on an iPad, a daytime show in the living room on, and grandma upstairs watching her shows.

The reason I share password is just because there's no way to get full-hd (let alone 4K) for a 1 screen plan. I have to pay for 2 screens to get 1080p, and for 4 screen to get 4k. If someone in my family is paying for 4 screens, we should be able to use it with 4 people, right?

Yeah, I keep wondering about this business model choice too. Netflix is the only major streamer left at this point charging for HD and 4K as separate tiers. The other major streamers do sometimes tier on simultaneous screens, and often refer to higher tiers as "family plans".

Netflix is at least unintentionally messaging at this point that "only families want or need higher quality streams" and that is a very weird mixed message in the current streaming market, especially now with their slowly increasingly more hostile messaging that they are tired of people sharing passwords (because the shareholders demand account growth in a saturated market with a much-increased field of competitors).

for that matter we should stop calling 1080p HD :(

on a mordern display 1080p content are visibly pixilated

I'd love it if we could just go back to the sane convention that calls a spade a spade. Eg, it's 120 V and 240 V, not "standard-volt" and "super-volt". USB is participial farcical with their ever laughable naming schemes. At least Ethernet is reasonably sane.

(And don't get me started on how 4K is a blatant lie as it's really 3860-px wide. 2160p is also ok. Real 4K is a thing, but not consumer).

4k being 3860px thing doesn’t even matter. It’s still 4x the pixel count vs 1080p and looks excellent.

The real quality problem is bitrate, not raw resolution. A 1080p Blu-ray looks absolutely amazing on a 4K TV. Low-bitrate 4k looks like dogshit. I’d be ok with Netflix’s 1080p if the compression wasn’t so poor on some titles!

Totally agree. There should be a cheaper option of one-screen 4K and without the games. I don't understand why I need to pay for the games that I don't want to play.

Oh yeah, totally forgot about the games. Instead of renewing shows, just dump money into games for you VIDEO STREAMING service. Because of course!

Think of the people who would be interested and who would be able to play 4k.

Do they have money? Absolutely. To stream 4k you need a good internet connection and good equipment.

With this in mind, it completely makes sense to charge the most for 4k. Someone that cares is more than wealthy enough to pay for it. Having a 4k 1 person plan would be a loss of profits.

You can stream 4K on common network connections (20mbps), and 4K TVs are cheap. While I agree that it’s premium, just because many people don’t notice the quality difference, the real problem is the competition. Disney Plus, HBO Max, and Amazon Prime (and even Peacock!) have 4K HDR on their basic paid plans. Netflix is drastically behind here.

Think of the shareholders!

Haven't subscribed to Netflix for a few years now (issues with their content). What is this about paying for screens? Don't you just have access to their service once you pay for it?

"Four screens" means you can run four streams concurrently.

Their higher tiers increase both your maximum streaming resolution and the number of simultaneous streams you can do.

They also allow 5 profiles. I don't know why one person would have more than a single profile.

What the actual plans seems to be is to keep multiple profiles and multiple streams but insist that users of a plan are "in the same household" which is totally nuts and the most cable/broadcast TV way of thinking possible.

Presumably they will fingerprint each client and ensure that these clients are "normally" coming from the same location or even IP. Totally mad, will end in tears .

4k on Netflix isn't worth the additional cost. Only Netfix' own productions are 4k, and the additional resolution is consumed by an excessive amount of artificial film grain.

What would you pay for a one screen, 4K plan? $15?

In 2015, I would have been all over that. But with every media company wanting their piece of my wallet, I have a hard time justifying paying for Netflix on its own.

Part of the appeal of sharing your account is that it brings the effective cost closer to $5/mo/person at most.

Or, what most people I know do: one person pays for Netflix, one for Disney+, one for HBO, etc. Even if I can get a single screen 4K plan for say, $10, there’s no way I’m paying $50 for 5 different services for just myself.

Thanks. That’s a bit different than the other user’s reasoning that the single screen plan ought to support 4K, since the single screen 480p plan costs $10/mo, twice what you’re willing to pay for a service.

You valuing access around $5/mo suggests Netflix’s experimental pricing of $3-4/mo per shared login might be dialed in, though.

I would say that, the 1 screen plan should support full HD, and the 2 screen plan should support 4k, as current price. They can save money by not spending in games. C'mon, we are in 2022, no one wants to pay to watch 720p

Their pricing model is problematic for most households. For such a brilliant company I, for the life of me, can’t understand the arguments for not having a single screen, 4k at a lower price type model.

I'll explain it to you. 4k requires relatively expensive equipment and relatively expensive internet connection.

So the reasoning is as follows: What's the average income of people interested in 4k streaming? The answer is "of our subscribers they tend to be on the higher end of the spectrum" then why not upcharge them given that they are in the segment that's both interested and wealthy enough to pay for it.

4k 1 screen would have to be cheaper than the current 4k 4 screens, therefore you'd be losing money because a portion of people in that wealthy segment would be effectively downgrading their plans.

The alternative point of view is "how many people wealthy enough and interested in 4k do not have a Netflix account?" I would assume they probably think most everyone in this segment does have Netflix. These are probably the kind of people that have all streaming services.

If you look at Netflix strategy they're not trying to capture more people from the top; as they already have them. They're trying to capture low income people and so it makes much more sense for them to offer cheaper plans with ads rather than cheaper "premium" plans.

Hope that makes sense.

How times have changed

https://time.com/6223415/netflix-password-sharing-crackdown/

Well, that's one tiny step forward from "you can't share your account because I said so how dare you even think of such a thing you should be cancelled" (not even ranting about Netflix specifically, just all the companies in general that do this).

and the fake 'your password is wrong'?

pathetic!

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