Netflix wants to chop down your family tree | Hacker News Reader

Netflix wants to chop down your family tree

pluralistic.net

Prediction of the future:

1) Netflix rolls this out

2) Mass exodus.

3) Media addiction makes sure people get their TV elsewhere. Maybe disney+ amazon prime hbo, maybe cable, maybe youtube or tick tock, or even something different.

4) Just when Netflix learns their income goes down, customers learned to live without them.

Half of any subscription service's money comes from people too apathic to unsubscribe. If you force them away, they'll be too apathic to unsubscribe from their new service. Someone nees to tell the MBA's: don't get rid of your paying customers if you want to make money.

Several years ago (maybe a decade?) Netflix decided they wanted to A/B test commercials. I was one of the customers they streamed commercials to. At that point I noticed there was nothing in the user agreement saying they couldn't or wouldn't stream commercials. They just didn't.

I canceled my Netflix account the next day. The implication from their marketing material was they would not stream commercials (specifically, the ad that said "enjoy premium content in your own home without commercials.")

So. You know. F them.

I have learned to live without Netflix. So at least for one customer, point #4 above seems legit.

> specifically, the ad that said "enjoy premium content in your own home without commercials."

Surely showing you commercials would make that false advertising? In Australia where I am at least I am fairly certain it would and would open them to fines, but IANAL so IDK

I don't think you can sue Netflix. The use agreement says you agree to arbitration. I'm sure they would make some argument that no one takes ad seriously, it wasn't delivered under oath and it's true for the overwhelming majority of customers so therefore the ad is "not appreciably false."

I don't get the jump from 1 to 2. I don't see a lot of people saying "If I can't share this with grandma, I won't subscribe at all". These aren't the paying customers being excluded.

There will surely be some, but the default case is likely "grandma stops watching Netflix". That's an "exodus" of people who weren't paying them anyway (and were consuming bandwidth). In a few cases, they'll pay more money for grandma. Netflix bets that this category is bigger than the one who quit.

Why would paying customers quit? To teach Netflix a lesson? I suppose it happens. Because they think AppleTV/HBO/Hulu is a better deal? I suppose that happens, too, but we're talking about products in the range of $10/month (or ad-supported) -- not exactly the kind of thing where people are going to find massive bargains.

There will be some exodus, to be sure. But I don't see any reason for a mass exodus.

> Why would paying customers quit?

A small-but-meaningful number of 'paying customers' aren't themselves users. They are paying the subscription price for the value of community peace, not any specific content.

For example: I pay for a Netflix account. I never use it anymore (since Netflix keeps killing the only shows they made that I liked), but my kids use it sporatically-but-heavily. (i.e., maybe one or two hours per day 4-ish days a week, but all at once). If Netflix makes it break for my kids (like they're threatening to) then I might as well cancel it anyway, it's worthless for those 'kid tv breaks' now.

It sounds like a small-but-not-trivial percent of Netflix subscriptions are something like mine (paying to keep other people happy, paying to prevent people from bothering them, not to watch any specific show/movie). And Netflix is playing in the "fuck around" part of "fuck around and find out".

If I look around me, alot of netflixers are 2 to 4 families pooling together. Individually they pay €5. These are the people who will need to renegotiate in their pool. I'd say this is the biggest group of Netflix users.

Combine that with europe getting less content than the US, with bad or no subtitles, and the quality of the content going down the last few years. People are discussing cancelling already. Forcing these people to decide now can't end well for Netflix. And if people around you cancel without much hassle, why wouldn't you?

Maybe I would care more if Netflix contained any shows worth watching, instead of thousands of middling, forgettable Netflix “Originals.” Scrolling through Netflix these days is like digging through the bargain DVD bin at Walmart.

I think the only reason that most people still have a Netflix subscription at this point is momentum. Now that Netflix has given everyone the impetus to stop and think about what the hell they’re paying for, I think this move is going to be a far bigger business disaster than Netflix is expecting.

Indeed. Ever since I can remember, I’ve been on the receiving end of what Silicon Valley bros choose to designate as “edge cases”. My family is spread out in different regions and anything with an account doesn’t really work in “family setup”.

> I’ve been on the receiving end of what Silicon Valley bros choose to designate as “edge cases”.

The edge cases don't even have to be that "edge".

We have a pretty 'normal' family, (two parents, single household), but happen to have 5 kids. We fit into a single regular minivan, but Amazon Kids Tablets don't work (Amazon families max out at 4 kids, I suppose) and this new Netflix plan also has a same 4-simultaneous limit.

Like, either no one at Netflix thought about this at all, or some senior leadership is high on their own supply, and overruled every reasonable voice within the org.

What's most frustrating is the utter lack of accountability or communication to and from these companies. I'd love it if there was a direct line to the leadership of these companies to address and improve this kind of issue.

HN is full of engineers, why can't your perfectly reasonable scenario get escalated and addressed properly?

The people need a voice.

I pay for way more streaming services than I should but unsubscribed from Netflix years ago and started sharing a login with extended family. Even though I have access to it I rarely use Netflix. The only thing I remember watching in the past year is The Sandman. Almost every interesting new show or old movie is available on a different service. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for them.

If you're not paying for it, and not watching it, they don't much care that you're not going to subscribe.

They'd rather have you subscribe, and will continue to produce stuff that they hope will attract you. But they're aware that there are numerous services and they're going to have to share your attention (and your dollars).

It's "the beginning of the end" only in that they're not expanding any more because pretty much everybody on the planet has one or more of these services. It shifts from an expansion policy to a maintenance one, where people will probably jump from service to service, and continue to hope that they'll hit on that blockbuster show that causes people to want to pick them.

That's not unique to them. Everybody is in the same boat. Expect a similar course from other providers.

Once the initial hoopla around many of these web based ‘services’ (Gmail, Netflix, Facebook, etc) has worn off, we discover that many of the business models are downright hostile to consumers.

I feel like we are seeing the cracks in the web services facade, where alleged innovation is being replaced with brazen moat keeping. When the customer is in the way of your business model, you’ve lost the script.

As single person I wish more companies made this move. Increase the price for shared accounts and bring down the price for single users. We should not be forced to subsidise others.

I figured this was coming at some point. Believe it or not[0], I don't share my password with people beyond my immediate family. My immediate family is likely to run smack into one of those edge cases. I share custody with my children and I share a Lake House with family. My Netflix account is used for my kids mobile devices, my son's laptop, my daughter's iPad, one of their TVs at Mom's[1], all of their TVs at home and the two TVs at "The Cabin"[2].

Like a lot of us, I've thought about this problem and come up with several ways to sort it out. I have business internet service at home and a DD-WRT router up north. I have it configured with a virtual access point that is bridged via VPN to my home network and could easily tunnel the TVs that way[3]. The problem is that Netflix isn't providing me a service I can't get from someone else (or via piracy[4]). The funny thing about all of that, though, is that I had a major hardware failure (PSU took out ... nearly everything) in a server over a year ago. I solved it by subscribing to a bunch of services and stopped downloading movies/TV much the same way I stopped downloading MP3 files two decades ago -- the streaming services were far less ideal than what is/was available for music, but they were approaching "good enough" and were a lot less work for me.

I expected this would come and I'm curious to see how it plays out. I don't even know how I am going to actually react if I get flagged. I am becoming more and more unhappy with the various streaming options available, today, and I subscribe to -- like -- 9 different services?

Here's where they're currently failing:

  1) Every service has the same 200-300 videos, produced in Canada, usually True Crime series (sometimes with different titles but the *same episode* -- in one case, a Netflix documentary movie was listed as an Exclusive and it was *identical* to a Discovery+ documentary with a different title).
  2) The UX of every service has various things *very* wrong -- each has its own selection of profanity-inducing circumstances, be it "they don't re-connect when things go wrong" or "I hit the home button by accident and it takes 10 clicks and 2 minutes to return to the thing I was watching", etc.
  3) Every "Season", each of the services gets 80% of the same movies, most of which are trash. The "good" movies are split up among 4-5 services.
  4) The "big" things I want to watch are all on different networks, some of which have *nothing* else that I want to watch (read: Peacock and Paramount+)[5]

I'm paying a "Typical Cable Bill plus some Premium Channels" would cost but do not have cable or a cable-like subscription (Youtube TV, etc). Contrast that with my media server setup: Everything can be searched in one place. If I don't have it, I can go to a locally hosted web site, put in the name of something and it'll (usually) show up in 5-10 minutes. If it's a TV show, it'll start downloading everything. The cost was an (older) server with a dedicated RAID controller -- about $2,000 which lasted about 5 years (and was mostly used for "things other than streaming movies/music"), a VPN subscription at a few bucks a month and some patience setting everything up.

I'd put my money on "if any one of my services flags me, I'll probably cancel all of them and go back to the more convenient days"

[0] Honestly, I don't care.

[1] My son got logged out and couldn't reach Mom, so he called me for the password; that's probably the most likely to get flagged.

[2] Which is used from May-November about 50% of the time. We all have Netflix accounts; it really didn't make any sense to buy a separate one for a home we don't use year round, though we do that for cable television.

[3] I've done this back when I wasn't willing to open a port for Plex

[4] I am financially capable of paying for things I want to watch so I do. I pirate movies when I cannot get them in the format that I want. I would buy BluRay discs if I could rip them and play them from my media server with all of the audio/video features. While I can do this with various tools, it's far more convenient to just download something someone else ripped and I don't feel particularly bad about choosing not to jump through a mess of hoops just to reward the movie studios for their awful technology. That said, due to a server meltdown, I have exactly zero pirated movies, today.

[5] What a missed opportunity ... I wanted to watch Picard -- it's $50 if I want both seasons. That's a few months of service. Had they given me an offer like "Subscribe for 6 months and you get a code to purchase the season on Apple/MS/Amazon/etc for (hopefully) more permanent streaming rights" I would have done it and given the service a chance. This could have been offered to me when I viewed the Picard series on Amazon Prime...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com