Nope. Sorry, Netflix. I paid for 4 concurrent streams and now you're reneging on your contract. I didn't care much when they constantly bumped the price either.
Been a Netflix subscriber since 2012. I don't really watch as much, but my mother occasionally watches a movie or two a month. My brother in college binges a tv show once in a while.
I know that neither of them will go out of their way to subscribe to Netflix.
I bet they missed the 1 million subscribers who canceled netflix in Spain when they pulled this shit. Maybe some people in his family weren't paying for the bill out of their own account, but the service could easily be worth the price for the value all three members of a family get out of it, but not at all worth it for just one.
Even when a family member, friend, or a romantic partner watches a netflix show on an account that they didn't personally pay for, they're still watching netflix, still talking about good shows they saw on netflix with others, still posting about things they saw on netflix online, and still providing netflix with valuable data and metrics and netflix is still making money.
Netflix can't be that concerned about it if they are continuing to roll out this change into their biggest markets after having tested it in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal etc.
I really wonder if they genuinely think all the broke and massively in debt college kids on their parents netflix accounts will just fork over the cash for Netflix's ever increasing monthly fees and that they have data showing that it'll make up for the loss of subscribers and viewers this will cost them or if there's a CEO caught up on a sunk cost fallacy or something. It seems like this couldn't come at a worse time for netflix considering that there are a growing number of competitors with better offerings for less money, netflix has been getting objectively worse, piracy is easier and more affordable than ever, and a huge amount of things that aren't even streaming television are competing for our attention.
Low cost, convenience, and having a decent catalogue of content made netflix what it is today, but today netflix is getting more expensive and less convenient, while their library struggles to have enough worth watching to keep people around all year.
They will when I cancel the service, acquire the content using some alternative methods and make it available to my brother and mother on my Plex server.
I mostly pay for the convenience. Make it inconvenient and I'll use my time to make it work my way.
I'm travelling for work from time to time as well, having my Chromecast With Google TV ask me to authenticate each time because it doesn't recognize the network as my "home" is inconvenient. Plex doesn't do this, so it wins on that end.
That seems like a punitive effort to respond to netflix, but I bet if they do it they will be likely to resubscribe later on if they actually enjoy watching it.
I don't know about OP, but there are people who don't feel particularly guilty about not contributing money to starving multi-billion dollar publishers. The only reason they used Netflix was because it was convenient and affordable.
>The only reason they used Netflix was because it was convenient and affordable.
Given most of the shows on Netflix are exclusive, it's not a stretch to think people enjoyed their content. Consumers aren't zombies that just watch whatever is cheapest and easiest. If that were the case the only successful streaming service would be Youtube or something.
That’s probably a fair statement, but I highly doubt there is a substantial audience of families that want to watch four separate shows at the same time in the same house for them to justify the research and marketing to implement.
2 parents, 2 kids. It might not happen all the time but I think in a family of 4 it's easy enough to run into this scenario that you might be interested in 4 streams.
This is relatively easy to handle for e.g. family sharing for Apple - everyone uses the same billing method, so it's naturally limited to people where you feel comfortable covering the cost of all their Apple digital purchases.
Netflix has no such "real-world" limit to apply that naturally covers students and other dependants, so they seem stuck with various contrived options.
I feel like # of simultaneous streams really ought to have been the natural limiter. If you're allowed two streams, it doesn't make a difference in the real world whether the two streams are to the same physical house or not.
Yep, I'm divorced and my minor son goes back and forth between his mother's house and mine on a weekly basis. I have a NF subscription and he is signed into my NF account over there on his xbox and the moment NF tries to extort additional money from me is the moment I cancel my subscription.
A tip if you travel often is to set up a wireguard tunnel to a home computer. You just need port forwarding on your router enabled. Works better than any paid VPN service for watching your local netflix and it can't be detected.
I think this might be moot. "Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are — at home, on the go, on holiday ..."[0] suggests that they'll use some mechanism other than IP to determine that there is against-terms "password sharing" going on. Probably something like device sessions instead.
Time will tell if this is the right move. Personally I can't remember the last time I watched any content that came from NF. I think the last time I even considered something on their platform was when Stranger Things season 2 was released. Maybe.
Something tells me this isn't going to go the way the would have hoped.
> Something tells me this isn't going to go the way the would have hoped.
Netflix is renowned for testing changes to the product, learning from the data, and iterating. We know that they have been testing in various markets over the last year or so.
So I'd be pretty sure that they are confident in this change.
It's interesting that jumped all the way to this, instead of working down from the accounts that log in from 20 cities, 10 cities, 3 cities, 1 city, etc.
From previous information I've seen, they'd have to physically go home once a month and use Netflix on their device there. Otherwise that device will get flagged.
We are invested in a company that does TV productions for regional markets, the content often being sold to the major streaming partners of that market. One of our partner's produced shows was a top 10 global Netflix production. Yet even they contend that Netflix's acceptance process is by far the most whimsical of them all. And with the recent shift to Americanization and wokification of content, it seems they are losing ground to Amazon Prime in regional markets. With these kinds of faux pas, I wonder if Amazon won't eat their lunch (and their daily bread) very soon.
I think the price is fair for the amount of content, but my family has been considering leaving Netflix to cut down on screen time and save a few bucks. I picked up YT premium, which saves me a lot of time waiting to skip ads. I wish they had this when I was a kid with the 13 VHF and 52 UHF channels in Brooklyn when I was a kid. If you buy Starbucks coffee, then Netflix is just 2 or 3 lattes a month to make up the difference! I went back to Dunkin a while ago when I don't have my thermos with me ;)
I don't think we'll turn off NFLX indefinitely, and we probably won't pause. But this might get us to consolidate with other family members. If NFLX is blessing account-sharing, then we might take them up on the offer. Going it alone is pretty expensive.
