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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I care that they are trying to get people to stop sharing accounts. At large, that feels fine and I'm always curious the lengths people will go through to not pay a small subscription fee. Especially for things they actively use the heck out of. (Notably, I seem to only know of people that do this where both sides of the share watch a ton of television.)

I am not at all looking forward to it again thinking I'm sharing my account within the same household. Last time they were trying this, I had to setup the kids TVs, again. Was very annoying.

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This is the thing, I pay for a family plan with 4 concurrent streams. I allow my mom and brother to use this account. They barely use it. But the service isn't worth $20 to me if they cut them off. I will just cancel it, and they wont pick it up either. If you sell me 4 concurrent streams, then I want to be able to use them regardless of physical location.

So you’re paying $20 for a service that you and your brother and your mother barely use? Why?

If a movie rental is $6 and you watch one movie a month, it’s maybe worth it if 3 people are watching 1 movie a month (plus a little extra).

But not worth $20 for 1 movie or show a month. Better off just renting stuff or buying shows. Or for some people, worth toggling subscriptions as needed eg I subscribed to Hulu to watch The Bear, Peacock for the Olympics, Fox for the World Cup, etc. Then cancelled immediately after (with Apple I can cancel immediately after subscribing, so I don’t forget!)

I signed up to Netflix prestreaming. When they switched to streaming, it was a great deal. They had loads of content and no competition. That is not the case anymore. I continued to pay because I used it enough that it was worth it. Then I kept it because my mother and brother couldn't afford it on their own and I wanted to provide some value to them. Netflix is making me re-evaluate the value they provide us. Here is a corporation that I have been paying for for over 15 years. My oldest subscription. If they are about to lose me, imagine how many others are on the fence as well.

You should cancel Netflix!

I just find this hard to really come to terms with. Why is access for others a consideration to what it is worth to you? And do you have any logic that would allow you to share with family, but would not allow friends to share? For that matter, why can't I just pay one login for my entire neighborhood?

(And before you think that is obviously wrong, realize that some buildings do just that sort of agreement for cable tv access.)

If Netflix had advertised itself with "neighborliness is sharing a password" and encouraged people to sign up for 30-screens-at-a-time plans, you might have a point. But they didn't.

Actually they did. https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712

Because there are so many services just like Netflix, I cancel the ones I'm not using. Netflix is the only one I share with my in-laws, who watch a few episodes a week on it. But I also don't care to cancel it when they are using it. That's a human thing, not a money thing. Take that away, and I will happily cancel Netflix for at least half the year, and only have it active when a particularly compelling show comes along for binging. It is at least twice as expensive as the other services, so I'd prefer not to have it active 12 months out of the year.

I can't think of a way they can enforce almost anything without annoying a bunch of people with false positives.

If someone has a secondary home like a chalet they go to from time to time, they'd have to pay for a second account?

No, because they do explicit vacation passes. If you literally maintain two households --- or, like my family, have a kid in a college apartment --- you're probably going to have to spring for a second account. Which, fair enough: the college apartment also requires us to spring for a second ISP bill, second utilities, second toaster; it was nice to get away with not duplicating the Netflix bill, but not reasonable to feel entitled to it.

Probably will impact folks that travel and want to watch while away from home. Specifically, those where their family did not travel with them.

That said, probably easy enough to deal with that, as I'm guessing most of them take a common device with them? Not sure.

But, yeah, your example is pretty much how I view this. Was nice for a few cases where it was working. But hardly earth shattering.

I don't know anything about Netflix's system, but similar-seeming anti-fraud systems just fingerprint devices. Chances are, if you normally watch from your laptop or iPad and travel a lot, you're not going to notice any changes.

Exactly. Is what I tried to allude to with "common device."

That said, with how many folks leave their contacts in rental cars, I wouldn't be too shocked to know folks try to login at other locations. I imagine that would be a popular integration with hotel booking systems. Basically, make it so your netflix is attached to the hotel tv when you get there.

My gut is that hotels also don't want that?

No, it is not "fair enough". Those aren't the same situations. You need to pay a second ISP bill because that requires physical infrastructure to be laid down and maintained. Same with utilities and the toaster. Once you have the network connection you can access Netflix just fine. Unless they place an arbitrary restriction on it.

Me thinks you haven't given much (any?) consideration to how much physical infrastructure Netflix has sprinkled around so that streaming works well.

Then they shouldn't sell multi-screen plans. I don't particularly care about how much they spend on infrastructure-- that's not my problem. If I'm a customer I expect to be able to use what I pay for

By that logic, everyone on earth can share a single account!

Perhaps you didn’t know, but Netflix operates one of the biggest CDNs on the planet: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

> By that logic, everyone on earth can share a single account!

I suppose we can take turns watching content on their 3 screen(!) plan. My ticket #1,204,394,701 should come up in around 30,000 years.

If I pay for 7.88 billion concurrent streams, yeah I would expect to be able to have everyone access it

What a stretch of logic on your part. They don't offer a plan for several billion people

Presumably they know when they are streaming for a given account. They could simply say an account can be used for a single stream, and decline to start a second concurrent stream for the same account. Include download playbacks as a form of stream. The headache of coordinating watch times when sharing accounts would incentivise additional subscriptions.

That is precisely what they shouldn't do. I have several televisions and devices in my one house.

Granted... We don't actually watch too much television, such that it may not actually impact us if they do it this way. Still, I imagine many families with children would be heavily impacted by this strategy.

Yes! You have a second home and it's a chalet. You can afford two Netflix subs.

Yes. Not to bothered about the account sharing but it’s looking like it may add a bunch of friction to use Netflix away from your primary residence/device.

If the friction becomes to much, Netflix looses its value and illegal downloads look more appealing again.

When current budgets are tight I can’t see how Netflix wins with this as likely will push away users as it’s a non essential service with declining content quality as they’ve gone for quantity not quality now and Netflix isn’t the only streaming provider in town now.

> that feels fine

Sure. It's also fine for everyone they're betraying to cancel their subscriptions. I don't understand what your point is. Are you saying it isn't fine to be upset?

Netflix specifically promoted account sharing. Paying for multiple streams, "love is sharing your password," etc. And they made millions of dollars off that marketing during the pandemic lockdowns. Now they want to pull the rug out from under people. They deserve every bit of criticism they're getting.

While it isn’t unnatural to react so emotionally to this, I think the only thing to really ask yourself is: do you enjoy the shows and movies that Netflix has? Is it worth the price? If the answer is yes, then who cares how they evolve their terms?

This is a funny aspect to me. I'm much more likely to cancel if they keep canceling shows after a season. :D

No. The only thing to ask yourself is: do you allow antisocial behavior to go unpunished?

Your proposed heuristic is both objectively terrible from a game-theoretical perspective and completely unnatural for any primate.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#The_ite...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1220806110

> allow antisocial behavior to go unpunished?

I don't know where people get the energy from to do this sort of thing. It must be exhausting.

"Fuck that, I cancel" doesn't take much energy. And it puts money in your pocket.

Concur if it is about the value for money you get no longer making sense. But if one does it purely out of spite or to make a point, I think there are better ways to spend one's energy and time. But that's just me.

People keep saying that Netflix explicitly promoted account sharing. Netflix has been telegraphing that they were going to clamp down on password sharing for years. Nobody can pretend they didn't see this coming. I dispute that a random social media manager joke tweet from 6 years ago is dispositive of anything, but even if it was, you've had over 2 years to cancel your account if you find this outrageous. This is on you, not Netflix.

Dude. I'm not a Netflix subscriber and I haven't been for some time. Stop trying to make things personal, it's against the site guidelines and it's ugly behavior besides. This isn't "on me" and has nothing to do with me. This has to do with Netflix getting greedy and jumping the shark.

Sorry, I'm addressing the whole thread, not just you in particular. It's not personal, but I could have written more carefully.

Many companies softly announce an intention to do something to guage how their users will react, then adjust course based on the response. Netflix has been doing that, and people spoke up. Now that they finally committed and have rolled this out, of course the people who spoke up (and probably many more that didn't care until it was actually rolled out) will speak out against this.

Nobody is "pretending" that this came out of the blue. That train of thought is just as disingeous as expecting people to stay silent and cancel their subscriptions over what may not end up becoming policy.

If I have an apartment and I'm single, but the plan that best fits my needs has an allowance for streaming on two or four devices at once, then why should I not be able to share that extra device I'm never using but paying for?

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