Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Kids away at college will just get their own accounts now. Compared to the cost of college with room and board, a monthly Netflix subscription is nothing, especially with the cheap ad-supported tier. Kids away at college do things like eat at restaurants and buy clothes which require money too, and if that money's coming from parents then so will a separate Netflix account.

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.

View on HN

> Kids away at college will just get their own accounts now.

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.

Or all services will do this, and students will just pay.

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.

I think you've forgotten what the community at college was like. If one person on your floor knew how to pirate, the entire floor knew how to pirate by the end of the first semester.

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.

> If one person on your floor knew how to pirate, the entire floor knew how to pirate by the end of the first semester

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.

> In other words, being at college doesn't have much of anything to do with anything.

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.

As both a recently cancelled subscriber and as parent with a child in college I can personally attest that my college student has simply moved on from Netflix

Reply on news.ycombinator.com