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.
This is not how it worked. Some percentage, say 20-30% knew how to pirate, and everyone else on the shared network profited because the 20-30% made public folders.
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.