Update on Sharing
about.netflix.com
about.netflix.com
I know honesty has never really been the fundamental value of public relations initiatives, but it would be refreshing to occasionally see a company saying that they’re putting the squeeze on customers because they need to protect their margins or even just because they can. The formerly-neutral “update” is starting to rankle.
- https://blog.chromium.org/2023/05/an-update-on-lock-icon.htm...
- https://blogger.googleblog.com/2019/01/an-update-on-google-a...
- https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2015/06/an-update-...
The rest: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22an+update+on%22+site%3Ago...
It seems straightforward and to the point. And they're a for-profit corporation, of course they need to protect their profitability. That goes without saying. If they go out of business, then no Netflix programming for anybody, and no subscriber wants that or they wouldn't be subscribing in the first place.
That said, the image at the top of the article is... menacing. I know it's sticking to Netflix branding, but the smiling, deeply red screens, made me feel like that house is about to murder everyone inside.
It is decidedly dark / menacing / imposing / threatening, not playful at all.
[0]: https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/16372...
The image at the top of the mail is also a bit creepy
That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
So of course this is a calculated bet to improve profitability. Virtually everything a for-profit corporation does is to improve profitability -- that's the whole point of being a business in the first place. What else would you expect?
If the market thinks the company won't be able to make a lot of profit, or the market thinks the company is approaching insolvency, the share price will tank.
In other words, falling share price is not a cause of insolvency, it can be an indicator for it. The share price quite literally is the market value of the company.
Of course it does. If a stock goes to $0, the company is essentially insolvent. Sure there are details of timing -- insolvency isn't exactly the same as bankruptcy isn't exactly the same as a stock price of $0 -- but in practice they all tend to go together and the company as a going concern owned by present investors is effed.
See how picking arbitrary dates different from yours makes it look like a completely different story?
Is it though? Were they funding operations by selling shares?
(Side note, recaptcha is getting genuinely awful. 3 different challenges, 1 of which had 3 steps, and 20 seconds to get past it?! Have they given up detecting bots and decided to just make them wait?!)
Your analysis makes no sense. Please learn more about finances before commenting on financial matters.
And if you look at the quarter before -- 2022Q4 -- they made just $55 million net income, which on revenue of 7.85B is below 1% profit.
The overall point is that Netflix is in an extremely volatile and risky industry where it's not in a position to leisurely "extract" more profit because it's a bad guy or something, but rather it's very much been forced into doing things like cracking down on password sharing and introducing an ad-supporter tier simply to stay healthy as a business. Fortunately both of those things seem to be going well, but they easily might not have.
If a company's market cap drops 75% in a short period of time, it's making big changes out of necessity, not as a comfortable choice.
You picked the one quarter they did poorly, before this they made a consistent 1B+ net profit. This is extremely good financials, and not volatile at all. They also have 50B in assets at the moment, including almost 8B in cash.
>That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
I had to read it 5 times to be sure that there was absolutely nothing being cut/made worse because they used the same corporate speak as one usually does for bad news (i.e. there was no "GOOD NEWS YOU NOW PAY $10 LESS", you had to dig through the details...).
>Company starts
>Makes things better to get a larger market share
>Gets a mini-monopoly (large enough share that inertia and name recognition can preserve its market share)
>Slowly but deliberately gets worse to increase profit margins
This, however, was a major supermarket chain that's been going for nearly 100 years. They decided to make delivery cheaper AND reduce minimum spend per delivery by half. There must have been something they made more expensive somewhere to compensate or maybe they were pushed to do this by the market, I am not sure.
Milk and eggs? Probably they saw a dip in spending because people can't afford extras. Cheaper delivery can get people to add-spend "cause I'm already paying for delivery, should make it worth it".
FTFY.
That's a great word, but wouldn't just plain "shittification" be better?
The root word is "shitty". Double T.
I've seen this a couple of times now without the double T, and it pains me.
They pretty much just state what they're doing, and even ack at the bottom that there are other options.
FWIW, I'm not (currently) a subscriber, and only subscribe seasonally as shows get released that I'm interested in (e.g. Stranger Things), which isn't often.
The idea that many updates are now hostile is a disturbing but real hallmark of the cloudified age, in particular. Users used to have more choice, to have the power to decide to update.
Now they cannot manage the software; that than being a user, they are now merely a client.
[not now] [ask me again later]
...
as to the title, maybe "on sharing" would be better.
I also remember Steve Jobs' memo on adobe flash. He titled it "Thoughts on Flash"¹
Also, a free tailscale account might be a good solution to the household restrictions
“An update on sharing: it’s bad now”
Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.
All I know is that with the fracturing of the streaming landscape, where everything requires a separate $8.99/$11.99/$15.99 (or whatever) monthly fee, downloading Linux ISOs starts to look more and more attractive.
Apple TV is $6.99 a month. Netflix looks to be $9.99 (ignoring the ad-subsidized offering which isn’t really comparable). It is kind of hard to share an Apple TV login (at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to share it without also sharing my whole Apple account), so I guess that extra $3 must be the price of all the sharing going on.
Although, Apple TV seems to have much better in-house shows, so who knows?
Yeah, I fell into the "do the right thing, it will be better" trap.
The modern solution is to sign up for a service, binge watch everything on it, and then cancel. But I don't really binge watch, and we have enough people in the house with different tastes it doesn't really work that well.
What really killed me is I pay for PBS Passport. But there are some shows with different licenses (I guess) that are only available on other services.
It doesn’t even get you 1080p (for that you need the $15.49 “standard” plan, and 4k comes on the $20 a month plan)
Maybe a bit off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone else actively avoids 4k? I hate watching content in ultra high resolution. It looks strange and unreal to me (Yes: I've turned off "soap opera mode")
I'm really glad netflix makes it easy to avoid higher resolution versions of their shows =/
Yes there is. For one, 90% of non-native 4K is absolute crap. Upscales tend to bludgeon detail even compared to 480p/i sources, and DNR is rather crap, especially on the intense settings companies typically use.
Native 4k can be better, but there’s still so many mastering options that it still causes problems. See Star Wars, LotR, Terminator 2 as all rather controversial 4K releases.
> "There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K. Your eyes aren't somehow low resolution with 1080p closer to that realism."
This is definitely not the case and one of the big reasons is lossy compression. Precision without accuracy can be very noticeable, in terms of artifacting.
You do it by setting up family sharing. But yeah it's super integrated, you'll be sharing a lot more than just Apple TV+ if you just set it naively.
If the goal is to just share TV+, then maybe a solution could be to create a separate Apple ID just for that, but actually using it will be difficult for Apple users.
My guess is this is Apples probably very successful way of disincentivising "account sharing" (as in, swapping access for your friends Hulu, Netfilx, etc, while enabling actual account sharing within a family)
Is that a veiled reference to piracy? If so, why not just say piracy?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Linux+ISO&am...
I suspect you're right about this. This change has no effect on the people who aren't sharing their account, so those people have very little incentive to comment except perhaps out of sympathy for those who it will affect. So most of the uproar will understandably be negative, even if a majority of users do not share their account.
These services only have new good content like 50% of the time. So it makes more sense to cycle subscriptions on and off. This is harder if you’ve given someone your password (I’d definitely not be subscribed to Disney+ right now if my sibling wasn’t using it).
I feel like I’ve already watched anything worth watching and would have cancelled my subscription already if it wasn’t for my family still using it.
I feel like Netflix is seasonal. Just like Disney+ and HBO.
Come fall Netflix will debut a bunch of viral bangers, and by February you'll be questioning if Netflix is worth it again.
Barring returning to piracy, I think I'd still have cancelled but sometimes subscribed for a month on the rare occasion something like The Queen's Gambit (2020) came out then cancel for a few years again.
HBO has some all-time classics that will be watched and discussed for decades, not just months. Sopranos is still discussed and rewatched and memed. Same with The Wire.
I feel that Netflix's offerings are hot for a few months, then fade from public memory.
- Higher prices
- Fewer features (rip DVDs)
- Even higher prices once you consider also subscribing to competitors
- Pay us for what used to be free!
So sign up for 1 month, cancel immediately and then watch what you wish for the month. Netflix used to be a pretty good deal because they had a depth of great old content from the major studios. But now it's scattered all over the other services, and we've all seen most of their decent original content.
Doing it this way I'm subscribed to Netflix 2 months a year. Apple for 1 month. Disney for 1 month. That's a difference of ~$40 a year vs ~$500 a year.
Don't stress that you'll want to watch it and can't. You can just sign up again. Even if you do it 5 months a year, you'll be way ahead. Just use the psychology that if you sign up you cancel immediately. Now the default is to save money.
Don't get drawn into the idea that this is a luxury that you can afford. Wasting money is not luxury.
Squeezing the customers has soft limits and it's always hilarious to watch corporations being oblivious to them.
As it is right now it's cheaper for me to hit up Disney+ for a month rather than rent or buy a new release elsewhere, but as that gets harder the less I'll consume.
Like for years I'd point this out and people were absolutely unwilling to recognize that giving away all their content near free was not a thing that would be around long term.
They want our money but can't figure out how to share between them to get it, so they don't and they reap what they sow.
I predict a renaissance in torrents.
Cable (or satellite TV) was all media creators and watchers having to deal with a small number of middlemen.
Having to have someone come to your house, install hardware, run wiring, have set top boxes, only being able to watch at home at a certain time without a separate recording device…does not sound anything at all like watching media over the internet.
I also do this with the Xbox Game Pass. Subscribe for a month, play some shorter indie games for which I wouldn't pay 15€ each and then cancel.
The amount of entertainment I and the three people I share with get out of Netflix isn't worth the 4x cost increase. Maybe the other guys will get accounts, I don't know. I'm sure for some people it's worth it.
If two of them get an account, or you change your mind later, it's a huge win for Netflix.
Netflix has done the math and already tested this policy in several countries. They would never be rolling this out in their home market of the US if they weren't extremely confident that new subscriptions will outweigh cancellations.
Out of that 1 million, I think only ~300 000 were paying customers, but still it did not achieve the desired effect.
Not 100%; with less viewers there will be less word of mouth about Netflix shows. Maybe that will be offset by paying less to license third party stuff with less viewers though.
But as more people say that and don't bother watching until there's a whole finished story, then even more shows get canceled earlier because nobody watched the first season.
Aggressively launching lots of shows and canceling the lower performing ones might be a sound financial strategy in the short term, but I don't think it's doing great things for customer goodwill.
That's still netflix's fault. They need to stop expecting the world to flock to their newest shows the moment they are released, there's too much competing for our attention, and instead invest in stories and creators they believe in, and make sure that they're always funding and releasing a complete and quality product. It doesn't matter if a show is only one season, so long as that one season has a satisfying conclusion.
Stories written to span multiple seasons are fine too, but they need to commit to seeing that show to its conclusion. Even if a show doesn't perform very well, some percentage of Netflix subscribers will enjoy it making it an asset for their library and on a long enough timescale it'll be worth it, but if they really want to cancel a show before the story has a chance to reasonably end, they'd be better off removing it entirely from their library. Right now their library is filled with shows that will entice new watchers only to piss them off when they learn the plug was pulled early, or which will sit unwatched by the people who have already heard that netflix screwed the show and its fans over and that's a liability.
The only streaming I'm paying for now is dropout.tv, the little niche service descended from College Humor that only has like 3 shows producing new seasons. But it's consistently great, I'm not worried they're going to cancel after every season, and I'm supporting a small group of creators who all seem like nice people. Win-win-win.
It's not on customers to respect the corporation's whims. Customers vote with their wallets.
Some folks have said it includes SSID as a check which is definitely a wrinkle. I would have assumed it was mostly just using IP address.
This is one of those cases where the War Against General Purpose Computing is going to own society, score points against users. I assume if you can root & run Magisk you could fake a geolocation for example. But Google & Apple have done everything in their power to make rooted/jailbroken devices practically unusable, to build attestation frameworks & SafetyNet & other systems to make sure corporate payloads run safe from user-agency on devices. What a shitty future!
> "We love people sharing Netflix," CEO Reed Hastings said Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. "That's a positive thing, not a negative thing."
> Hastings, who earlier in the day also revealed Netflix was now in 130 countries, didn't address broad password swapping, but did say a household sharing an account was fine. A lot of the time, he said, household sharing leads to new customers because kids subscribe on their own as they start to earn income.
I mention this lest anyone wrongly think Netflix has the moral high ground on this. Their CEO explicitly said it was OK to share your account, especially with your kids. It's not like those of us who did so were trying to be sneaky and steal service.
If Netflix wants to change the rules, that's their right. I loathe that this is sometimes being portrayed as a crackdown on piracy, though.
No, the only viable interpretation of their account setup is that it's explicitly designed for several people to use a single account. That means the "several family members in one house" setup is the baseline, and "people sharing Netflix" couldn't reasonably mean "...with their spouse and kids living with them.
> “We love people sharing Netflix whether they’re two people on a couch or 10 people on a couch,,” Hastings said. “That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.” To illustrate this example, he spoke of how a parent may share their login with their child. And when that child grows up, they will usually subscribe to Netflix, too.
Unless the couch is spanning multiple households, I don't see evidence for the claim. His keynote makes no mention of this so I assume it's mentioned somewhere else but I can't find the source. The CNET site is truly garbage.
Regarding 6 devices, that's nothing today, even considering an average family with two kids. Everyone will have their own phone so that's four. Then you'll have multiple TVs, computers, and possibly one or two tablets. My family of three (one kid), have 10 devices and I don't see that as out of the norm.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/11/netflix-ceo-says-account-s...
Netflix tweeted in 2017 that “Love is sharing a password”. There is no other way to read that statement other than being pro sharing. Which makes sense, I pay for X concurrent streams. Let me use my streams, period.
What amuses me in this thread that people who change their mind every 5 minutes accuse a company changing their mind after some years.
Nothing lasts forever.
First: you can subscribe to n simultaneous streams/downloads. Ours is 2, and sometimes the kids complain, and end up sorting it out somehow.*
Second: if you have a kid at college, they "live at home" for various other mechanisms (count as a dependent for taxation; qualify for parents' health insurance, can vote in their home district regardless of where they live; can be part of a family phone plan, family apple plan, etc etc...)
* And third: they don't seem to argue about netflix much any more; I think if I dropped the sub to a single session everybody would still be fine. Netflix seems to have an increasing density of junk content, losing its distinguished position.
And Netflix is a private company, so however dependents or health insurance or voting or phone plans are defined is irrelevant. Also, all of those definitions are different from each other anyways, so it's not like there's any consistency in the first place.
So no, this isn't about squeezing out every last drop, this is about making necessary structural changes to remain viable in the long-term.
It's particularly annoying because I personally find myself watching PlutoTV most lately (so much easier to just turn on something themed channels like Star Trek/MSTK3K/Stargate or Action/Comedy Movies and just watch what's streaming rather than browse around). And it's even more annoying to see that PlutoTV is playing many of the same movies you're paying for on other services.
People who regularly live between two households will be a common source of customer service tickets.
It took a couple of minutes to install and about a half hour to fully configure.
If they want us to go back to piracy, it's now easier than ever before. And I'm wholly prepared for it.
One major difference (I think?) is it appears Cloudstream doesn't include the "sources" by default in the core app. Maybe that will help them subvert copyright for a while if the client GUI is decoupled from the source of the pirated content.
Between that and the "is the thing I really want to watch available or not?" queue lottery, I got fed up a few years ago and ditched them completely. The general streaming experience has become so awful that I'll just go to Youtube or Amazon and pay $4 to get precisely what I want for 48 hours, instead of googling to figure out who the hell currently has 'Heat' or whatever on their streaming platform.
It's amazing, we've looped around to 1999. You have to surf around to see where and if what you want is even available - people even make aggregate guides to tell you what's on where (a TV Guide, if you will). A decent amount of the time, depending on your tastes, the thing you want probably isn't available on a platform you're currently paying for.
Tragically, though, you don't get the irreplaceable experience of talking in person with a full-bore, unfiltered Video Store Guy.
I am honestly surprised they keep pushing this. In Spain, Netflix is among the most expensive options, and the most expensive if you consider the features you get (the 7,99 euro option just gives you HD, not full HD, and only one concurrent device); and the content quality has been going downhill and has lost a lot of staple shows. Most people I know that had Netflix just canceled their subscription once the deadline hit, because the price for extra members is ridiculous (basically a full subscription cost) and without password sharing it's not worth it compared to the other options.
I guess that the move didn't have as much effect as people thought it did, and that's why they're continuing the rollout.
1: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/update-on-sharing-may-us
I'm not surprised. One of the big problems that faces Netflix is market saturation. Lots of companies like Google or Facebook can grow profits by getting you to use their service more. The more you use, the more they earn. Netflix can only get more revenue by getting more paying users or raising prices on existing users.
In the United States and Canada, Netflix has 74.4M subscribers. The US has 124M households and Canada has 15M (139M total). 54% of US/Canadian households already subscribe to Netflix. If each of those paying subscriptions is also being used by a second non-paying household, that means that 100% of US/Canada has Netflix. If that's true, the only way for Netflix to gain revenue would be by raising prices or eliminating the account-sharing and hoping that more people will be paying customers.
I'm sure Netflix has run the numbers based on their internal data. They already know who is sharing accounts. If 50% of accounts are sharing, that means that the 74.4M subscribers becomes 111.8M households and 80% of US/Canada. Basically, Netflix should know how close to the total number of households already use Netflix (even if they aren't paying for it).
If 80% of households already have access, you've basically hit your growth limit. You can't expect 100% - only 87% of households have broadband internet in the US and some people just won't be interested. It seems reasonably likely that Netflix is pretty close to their growth limit in the US/Canada without going after account sharing. If 50% of accounts are sharing, they've probably hit 90-95% penetration in the US/Canada given that 13% of households don't have the internet required for Netflix.
I'm not surprised simply because it seems like the only avenue of growth for Netflix in many markets. Netflix doesn't charge you per show. They don't have add-on packages for sports or whatever. If you love your local take-out place, you might order from there more. If you love Facebook, you watch more of their ads. If you love Netflix, you don't buy a new account each day. To keep growing in many areas, Netflix needs to break up account sharing.
That trick only works once and then they're right back to where they were with zero growth because everyone already has a netflix account or they've been so pissed off at netflix changing the rules of their service and with price hikes, and the decline in content, that they've already canceled and moved on to the many many competitors with bigger/better libraries.
Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time. Their profits will increase as their costs go down and global population grows, as well as by moving into new markets.
That said, netflix still has some opportunities to make more money. They can sell their shows on physical media (I have season one of Stranger Things on DVD), and sell merch for their popular shows. Now that netflix is heavily invested in production they have even more opportunities to sell things to fans. Their challenge now is creating content that people want to spend money on, and not pissing off the customers they have.
Yep, it just kicks the can down the road, but it might kick it ten years down the road.
One of Netflix's big problems is that they're really just HBO, but with more subscribers. As we're both talking about, they have some limits on their growth. At the same time, people have generally thought of them like a tech company.
> Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time.
The problem is that's extremely hard to actually do. People say this all the time, but often don't think about what it means. The problem is that if you're not trying to grow and change, usually someone comes along and pulls the rug out from under you. 1990s/early-2000s HBO could be described as happy with its premium-cable position and not needing to go for big growth. They would grow as the population grew. Except then Netflix decides to make a huge play: invest in tons of content and a big new streaming platform. Now Netflix starts taking over that space and taking a bigger share of the dollars being spent on video entertainment.
The problem is that customers aren't going to be loyal to a zero-growth, steady-profit company. Someone is going to come along and offer something that might be better - and if you aren't growing and investing, it's easy to get left behind. There's often a bear behind you and you need to keep running.
In fact, when Netflix launched its streaming service, it knew that it had to grow into a content producer and not simply a streaming service. Netflix could have said "we're so happy you love our streaming service, we'll just keep licensing whatever content we can for your subscription fees minus a cut for us." The company would have died. Licensing costs would go up, content producers would launch their own services like Disney+ and HBO Max, and customers that loved Netflix at the start would have left the service.
In fact, Netflix had to grow. Netflix had 7.5M subscribers when streaming started. 3 years later that was 20M. If Netflix didn't grow a lot more, they wouldn't be able to produce the amount of content that would keep customers around. 20M subscribers at $8/mo (the 2010 price and subscriber count) would be $1.9B in revenue per year. Netflix is spending $17B on content per year to keep their subscribers.
Maybe you argue that yes Netflix had to grow back then, but when you're Netflix's size now they could go zero-growth and allow sharing. But what happens when another company sees an opening to eat short-term losses building up a large content catalog on a non-sharing platform? Let's say I can get as much VC as I need and I build up an amazing catalog of content spending $40B per year on content and $8/mo service, but no account sharing on my service. I have way more and better new content than Netflix. I've seen the weakness in Netflix's business model (account sharing) and I've "solved" that issue by disallowing it from the start. Netflix subscribers start canceling (so they're now negative growth) and when my service feels established I can start raising prices to $10, $12, and $15 as time goes on and I've achieved 120M US/Canada subscribers instead of just 74M. Yes!
Zero-growth can certainly work for a while. At some point, it's hard because someone will attack that weakness and you'll end up with negative growth. Maybe what you were originally known for becomes just a feature. How many pieces of software have just become features of your OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked.... If Netflix hadn't pursued growth and invested heavily in content to fuel growth, their product (the streaming platform) would simply be copied by competitors who would then have better economics over the content. Heck, all the content companies that didn't invest in streaming saw Netflix eat their lunch for a time.
I think too many people have this idea that you can easily run a stable business with stable healthy profits, but that there's this insane compulsion toward growth. The problem is that there's always others coming to eat your lunch and customers aren't going to be loyal to you as a company. If Netflix hadn't invested in growth, someone else would have and then offered more and better content and then everyone would scream "why isn't Netflix offering as much good stuff as OtherFlix?" Well, you wanted Netflix to be focused on zero-growth stable profits and so another company came along and got better economics so they could offer more to customers than Netflix could.
Right now, Netflix has the most subscribers and that gives them the best economies of scale in the industry. Others are starting to catch up and could become larger if Netflix doesn't keep growing. At that point, it will be harder for Netflix to retain customers since they'll have less money to spend on content than competitors. Yes, we can complain all day about Netflix's content, but they still have the best subscriber count to create content with. That's a huge advantage in retaining subscribers - and an advantage they might lose if they go for zero-growth.
Disney+ could do that, they have a huge backlog of children's content and people will pay for "the digital babysitter". All they need to do is buy cocomelon and pinkfong and they'd rule the upcoming generation.
But if your content sucks, then a competitor can eat your lunch by having good content.
Even at Disney, it seems like the Disney Plus team is struggling to maintain the company-wide financial support it needs to grow large enough to be profitable.
1 million people canceled their netflix accounts in Spain over the change. The new policy has already cost them several million dollars. That's a pretty major effect. Maybe they think people sharing passwords costs them more over time, or maybe they're just willing to hemorrhage users now hoping that they'll somehow win some back later under tighter restrictions, and at higher prices. It still seems like a gamble to me, considering they have a ton of competition with better libraries.
I think cracking down on the worst offenders (hundreds of people all over the globe using the same account) and keeping accounts to a reasonable number of simultaneous streams would have been a much better option.
Torrenting is just choosing the most convenient distribution mechanism for data that you own. You can buy DRM-free music, but not DRM-free shows or movies unless they're bound to physical media. The reasons why have to do with backdoor meetings and lobbying by the MPAA, and I don't care much about them. And Netflix expects me to own nothing and be happy while leasing tenuous network access to compressed streams of content by paying indefinitely. Cute.
I think it's funny they got us to implicitly condemn solving their greed-based distribution problem with a term as hyperbolic as "pirating" though. They want to remain in meatspace, where the old economic model makes sense -- scarcity, wear and tear, manufacturing costs per unit, so they try pretending we're all still there in cyberspace by guilt tripping us with meatspace vocabulary.
Also: "Piracy" might be a bad term for the act of uploading and downloading something for which you do not have the rights to do so since it is indeed different than physical piracy, but "torrenting" is not an improvement, since torrenting _can_ be completely legal, depending on what content is being uploaded and downloaded. I think it's useful to have a term that specifically refers to the illegal act. I haven't heard of a good popular term for this yet, so I'm OK with using "piracy".
Also for all the injustice in this world, you getting so offended on Netflix's behalf regarding this is kinda mindblowing, you must be giga privileged.
Explaining a painfully obvious joke destroys the joke, even when it was painfully obvious in the first place.
Netflix is shooting themselves in the foot. These kids will just adopt content from other providers.
It's not like it's some great American tradition that kids at college use their parents' streaming account. Nor did kids ever start getting their own Netflix subscription after graduating. If they were using it during college, they would continue after college, because why wouldn't they?
In other words, being at college doesn't have much of anything to do with anything.
Or they won't and they'll just watch literally any other service which doesn't harass them about their precise location day to day, or worse they'll just go back to downloading all their shows like starving college kids used to until netflix showed up and was actually affordable and more convenient than piracy.
Sure, there will be college students who are more technical and comfortable paying for a VPN and who will invest in an external hard drive and will download torrents in advance of watching, as there always has been.
But that's way too complicated for most folks. And between the price of a monthly torrenting-friendly VPN and enough storage, the ad-supported tier of Netflix probably winds up being cheaper anyways.
Streaming had begun to fill the niche of being convenient enough to not needing to bother, but broke college students are going to save money in all the places they can.
Being in college is associated with not having money for all luxuries and having to prioritize. Plenty of students will think about whether their Netflix account is worth it or perhaps they should invest some time into learning this "torrent" thing.
Pretty sure those kids graduate and keep using their parents accounts (source: I graduated >10 years ago, still use my parents account). Unless they have kids of their own and need their own account.
But most gen Z and millennials are pretty broke (half living paycheck to paycheck: https://fortune.com/2023/05/19/quiet-quitting-side-hustle-se... -> https://archive.is/u415s ), so many wouldn't be able to pay for netflix on their own
Shared netflix has been a nice way for boomers and gen X to do something nice for their struggling kids. Really curious if Netflix will even make more money from this. Even if revenue doesn't change or decreases, they might also benefit by paying less in bandwidth per paying user.
In theory it would be ok to have such a rule. But for years they have used the sharing of account as a marketing trick to get new users. Imagine that they have 3 offers, with the most expensive one not far from 2x times the entry level price. The main difference was the ability to have 2 or 4 person's watching at the same time. Normally you would not have a real need for taking more than basic plans, but they pushed people to take the highest plan and share.
Now that they reached a peak in term of users, they switch their speech and pretend that they have to do a change because people are abusing of something that was not allowed to them in the first place.
So they need to get a good lesson with mass cancellation and downsizing subscriptions.
But they don't like it, so I can't use Netflix at all unless I sign into someone else's account (with that person's consent), usually my mom, who lives in the next town over but is not in my household, or my brother who lives farther away.
I'm only willing to make so many attempts to convince a company to let me give them money before I decide their service isn't worth the hassle.
but it's always good to remember that our own actions aren't necessarily the same as everybody else's. netflix has been rolling this out in a slow and cautious way across their territories, surely monitoring the impact, and decided to continue. and earnings are up, they've beaten or at least met projections the last couple quarters. whatever they're doing seems to be working.
Netflix sees themselves as a tech company with flashy servers toys, but they are in the media business. If their content is subpar, the best engineering will not fix it.
They have 80% saturation in US households, no real path to growth here.
Investors like to see more revenue ... so they try this. I think a paying costumer with shared passwords is better than, no customer at all.
Why pay more, when I can share my passwords on [insert other streaming platform] with my buddies.
I think that is basically it except for Amazon and Netflix. And Hulu is also owned by Disney. And Starz I guess.
It started with a low price and deep catalog. The very popularity of Netflix is almost entirely based on that steal of a deal. The cable breaker. People's expectations of Netflix are cemented in that era.
Now the price has roughly doubled whilst the catalog has degraded, and this is just one more nail in the coffin. Almost everybody seems disappointed in Netflix in one way or another.
Personally, I see the fragmentation of streaming services as a solution, not a problem. Jump from service to service with zero loyalty. Let them compete for your money instead of seeing it as a stale gym membership.
Source: https://www.today.com/popculture/netflix-guide-password-shar...
But if you're using a device that's always 4+ hours drive away, I think it's fair game for Netflix to look at that with suspicion.
Also, Netflix could look at viewing habits from different devices. If you watch something from a device at home, and then watch the next episode of that show at work, that's a good indicator that you're the same person using two different devices.
First, they should already know who has been sharing accounts. You haven't been having other households VPN to your local network for the past 5 years for Netflix. That gives them a great starting point.
They can look at SSIDs and not just your SSID, but all the SSIDs that your device is seeing. Even within a household, not all the SSIDs will be the same from room to room. For most people, there will be some overlap. Sure, maybe you live in a rural area and you're the only SSID around. For most people, it'll be hard to fake this.
Even if you make all the SSIDs look similar, have you dealt with your BSSIDs? BSSIDs can be used to geolocate most people pretty well. Almost no one has opted out of the big WiFi geolocation databases (or even knows they can).
Maybe you could have them VPN into your local network, but they could still use WiFi and other information to see that the connection is actually in a different location. Plus, as I noted, they should already know who has been connecting from multiple locations for years.
Maybe we all should change our SSIDs to "FBI Surveillance Van#1".
But if that’s really the case you can just use the same SSID on both places, and maybe use the same IP address space and router MAC. If they’re fingerprinting the home network that should do pretty good?
I guess I should have just kept it at 1 device and not tried to pay for my friend's usage.
For example, Netflix can easily notice that a TV is connecting from AT&T Fiber with one IP and another TV is connecting from Spectrum with a different IP. Many times they're watching at the same time so it's not someone on vacation.
It's relatively easy to note mobile devices like iPhones/Android and they have device IDs. Maybe you could hook your phone up to your TV, but most people aren't going to want to do that to save $8/mo (and walk up to their phone connected to the TV to select a new show or pause it). If the phone is on a WiFi connection (rather than cellular), Netflix can easily see that it's not the same household. People aren't likely to want to pay for a cellular plan (at $25+ per month) to avoid an $8 charge from Netflix.
If you're looking to catch 99% of people and you don't need it to be real-time, this should be pretty easy. Maybe some people will set up home VPNs, but that's going to be a small number of people. Even then, Android devices will give access to WiFi SSIDs in the area and even iOS has a permission to scan for Bluetooth devices which can be used for some amount of locating.
I guess the flip side of your question would be: how would you make it seem like you were connecting from the same household? You'd probably want all devices to be connecting from the same IP address. You'd probably want all devices connecting to the same SSID - and have neighboring SSIDs be the same. You wouldn't want them to see "they're both connecting to XYZ and have the same IP address, but they're each seeing a dozen additional SSIDs and zero overlap - what are the odds of that?" You can control your own SSID, but not all your neighbors' SSIDs.
I don't think Netflix is looking for something foolproof. I'm guessing they're looking for something that will find most instances of sharing while still being cautious enough that they don't bother people who aren't sharing. Even if your IP address is dynamic or CG-NAT, it'll still be the same for all your devices at a given time. Most people have internet from a handful of companies and it isn't that hard to figure out how those ISPs are handling things and accommodate it.
In fact, Netflix doesn't really need to do this blindly. They have logs from years of our usage. They have probably already detected who is using it in multiple locations and that makes it easy to put a flag on the account for the future. This account has been used in multiple locations for the past 3 years, if something looks suspicious, throw up the validation challenge. On other accounts without such a history, they could be more cautious. Netflix probably isn't worried about one month of sharing compared to the ongoing decade-long sharing that they believe is eating into their revenue. They can bide their time.
Are those IDs separate from the advertising IDs that users can constantly change?
I was not familiar with how much Netflix costs these days, either the subscription or extra sharing slots. Pasted here in case it's helpful. Sorry if this is redundant, didn't find with ctrl-f.
Standard with ads: $6.99 / month
Basic: $9.99 / month
Standard: $15.49 / month (extra member slots\* can be added for $7.99 each / month)
Premium: $19.99 / month (extra member slots\* can be added for $7.99 each / month)
Example, Sweden: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/update-on-sharing-may-se
Do you mean promos for other Netflix shows? Or are these ads for products/services unrelated to Netflix?
what are they doing now that is different? and how does that affect me with 4 streams?
What if you have friends who are basically family who more-or-less live with you? Are they not part of the "household"? "Sorry, Bob, while you maybe my daughter's godfather and donated a kidney to me, you're now going to need your own Netflix account because Netflix wants to mash the 'pump corporate profits' button that has been a primary contributing factor of both embarrassing wealth transfer from the poor to the rich and inflation post-pandemic."
While their focus now to cover the breadth of programming like cable as opposed to quality content, means they will likely stay where they are (lose selective subs, and gain cable subs) but just not as an emerging tech co. with new ideas that was once the N in FANG, but just as a legacy media network, while their consumers have a wealth of choices fighting for their time including social, gaming, real world events, etc.
Also, there are nontraditional families with multiple homes. How many accounts do they need?
They used to seemingly care helping you find new movies you like based on a star rating. Remember the Netflix challenge? Now I suppose there's a thumbs up, but really they probably just gauge based on if you watch or not.
Instead of adding tools to help people find a life-altering hidden gem of a movie they took them away. When their catalogue got exposed for being mostly garbage they just made it harder to stray from the most popular movies on the service. They had a social component I liked but they got rid of it a decade ago. Imagine if it were like letterboxd and you could have people you follow whose taste you liked and could trust to recommend movies? A company the size of Netflix would find this trivial to implement and yet they haven't because they want to make their service as stupid as possible. What about something like a faux-cable experience for people that don't want to pick from a list of 30k things? They refused to do that so now Pluto exists.
There are tons of ways that I think you could add community value-add but Netflix never did because they take their users for granted. I am sure this is literally a play to boost subscriber numbers based on how it went down in other countries. We'll see how it works but I for one have zero loyalty based on the contempt they show for the people that consume their product.
As long as you pay for a single subscription and you're not sharing it with others who try to keep accessing it after you've moved on to a new location, there's no problem.
Just make sure you log out of your account on the living room TV when you leave a home, that's all you need to do.
TBH, my guess is NFLX's solution is going to be "Yeah, fuck those 12 people who do that. We've got bigg^H^H^H^H more lucrative problems."
(Yes, yes, is joke.)
Love is sharing a password
Didn’t aged very well. Why I shall give you my money if you lock out my loved ones?
I mean, let it all be free, not my problem but if you are willing to pay for entertainment then how can you say you should be able to allow other people to not pay. I ask myself why they even allow other household members for free? Basic cable will cost at least 4-5 more. If you can afford that, replace it with netflix. If you can afford even more, get multiple streaming platforms.
I hate the fact that there are so many streaming platforms but none of their pricing is unreasonable.
Similarly, saying this is a bad business move seems without any evidence seems rash. I don't think anyone at Netflix particularly _wants_ to implement this so my guess is that they have some pretty compelling evidence for why this makes sense.
Anecdotally, most people I know are sharing the majority of streaming accounts with multiple people.
- one of the things you pay for in your netflix tier is the number of "screens" - 4 screens = 4 simaltaneous streams. Many people think the screens are theirs to use how they see fit
- netflix used to _encourage_ password sharing[0]
- and of course, the number one rule of the internet: never charge for what you used to offer for free
But, like you suggested, my house has access to 6 steaming services, all shared with other people, which leaves our monthly outlay at about $25. That’s a reasonable price to pay for me, and if I stop being able to share I will start to make some choices about my subscriptions. I wonder how this ends for Netflix, cashflow wise. They definitely aren’t worth the $20/m they’re asking, especially because by comparison that’s what I pay for the rest combined. In terms of content I actually want to watch they’re probably only about 4th best.
I've always had the intuition that bigcorps with relaxed anti piracy enforcement were better off because of networks effects and goodwill.
This honestly makes me want to cancel my subscription.
Why not just silently do this? What's the actual deal here?
This is not a food, medicine, shelter, human-rights, or access-to-knowledge situation. We're talking about bingeware, no one really needs this in any serious way, it's purely optional junk food for the brain, so there is absolutely no excuse for stealing it. Extra especially not because of how much as-good-or-better entertainment content is available online for free.
Swing and a miss. They've completely lost contact with their users.
People aren't pissed because they can't "use stuff for free" anymore. You can already pirate every show that's on netflix. People are upset because they were sold one thing, and now will not be getting what they paid for. I paid for x number of simultaneous devices/streams. I paid for a service which told me sharing passwords was perfectly fine. That's what I signed up for.
Now netflix changes the rules, which after multiple price increases, a library that has declined in quantity and quality, and an interface that is still terrible and increasingly stuffed with ads there is nothing mindblowing about the hate they're getting. They absolutely deserve to lose customers.
https://netflixtechblog.com/machine-learning-for-fraud-detec...
They define any type of sharing as "Account Fraud and abuse of Terms of Service"
<-- However, some restrictions are in place, such as the number of active devices, the number of streams, and the number of downloaded titles. Many users across many platforms make for a uniquely large attack surface that includes content fraud, account fraud, and abuse of terms of service. Detection of fraud and abuse at scale and in real-time is highly challenging. -->
Suffice to say, I cancelled my account and moved my business to Google Play Music and Tidal (for HiFi/Masters) where I am a paying customer now.
These type of controls are idiotic and are only thought to squeeze as much revenue as possible from existing customers.
COMPANIES: STOP SCREWING YOUR EXISTING CUSTOMERS!!!
A similarly ridiculous interpretation, of sharing it with the whole office: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35719281
I suspect Netflix will come out ahead with this, with how casual it seems to be.