Originally published at: Netflix plans to kill password sharing in the US have been delayed | Boing Boing
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Gee, can’t imagine why they’re thinking it over.
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“if online chatter is any indication” talk is cheap on the internet, except for Elon anyway. It’s like car forums, everyone says they want a car with a manual transmission. I think the percentage is less than 2%
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Killing password sharing is dumb, but not as dumb as claiming successful series are a loss and cancelling them. Do they not know that when the average person looks at back catalog shows we skip the ones that are incomplete and cancelled?
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I joined Netflix in 2002 to watch movies - it was the right service at the right price for me. It now costs 3x as much, is about to have very few movies (bye, Netflix DVD), and they want to add another multiplier to the cost for my elderly mother to keep watching Schitt’s Creek. I’m just waiting for the hammer to fall in the US so they can lose another 20+ year customer.
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My Netflix subscription is for two devices at the same time. I live on my own, so the other device is for my Mum to use.
The situation is nothing like the downloaders of old who devoured internet capacity to the detriment of others. People are choosing to maximise the benefits of the tier they are paying for. This move is just greed by a company that has been complacent and now sees other businesses eating its market.
Netflix is still charging a hefty premium for 4K when other plans include it as standard, there are wild regional availability issues over titles and it is increasingly pouring colossal amounts of money into mediocre ’events’ fronted by greedy Hollywood stars.
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Netflix says otherwise. Guess we ae simps in Canada Netflix says subscriber growth in Canada has increased after password-sharing crackdown
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Did they have their figures audited?
Something has them spooked about changing the US market, so I wonder if their figures for Canada are as rosy as they say.
They also said Spain was great, but a market research company says that it’s not. 
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I got one would cancel netflix if they killed password sharing. There’s only rare occasional things I watch there and I justify keeping it specifically because my mom and a friend use it too. They already make it so you can’t have too many people simultaneously using it. So you can’t like put your password on Reddit and share it with the world. I seriously don’t think password sharing is their problem. If they want more subscribers they need to invest in more content. (Actually I am looking forward to the new season of I think you should leave.)
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That’s what I do. I actually went up to the 4K plan, even though I don’t have a 4K TV, because I share with my daughter and SIL. They only have one TV also, but I wanted to be fair and give Netflix the edge.
Frankly, I wouldn’t hate it if they just let me add “friends and family” for an upcharge. I’d no longer feel like I’m cheating a bit so that would be fine by me. Making them get a whole extra subscription would make me unhappy.
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I don’t share, but I have several devices (streaming boxes, tablets, phones, etc.) in two places. If they flag me as “sharing” I won’t argue, I’ll just drop them like a steaming turd.
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Yah Canada is real mad about this one. Usually being the test market for America’s problems is a good thing. Not so in this case.
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Yeah, the “plans to kill password sharing” would have definitely led to this non-password sharer cancelling his account. I travel full time and am only physically at my “home address” once or twice a year. Any rule that I have to log in from there monthly makes the service useless for me. Ditto for my parents, who spend half the year in one state and half in another.
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My local library had the whole series on DVD. Hope your mom gets to watch through to the end.
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They definitely lost my business over this policy here in Canada. I’ve been a paid subscriber since 2010 when they first started operating here, was paying extra for 2nd simultaneous screen access and refused to pay yet another surcharge just because one of those two screens I was already paying for happened to be located across town at my parents house. I made dang sure to tell them exactly why I was quitting on the cancellation questionnaire.
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This whole thing feels like the brouhaha over software piracy in the 1980s. All the companies swore it was the greatest threat to their business in the history of human corporations. Herculean feats of DRM were undertaken to prevent it, massive government lobbying to write new laws about it, all stops were pulled, all hands on deck, etc etc.
Then a few years later, analysts looked at the data and were like, “uh, actually piracy was costing you basically nothing because the people pirating wouldn’t have bought your stuff anyway. In fact, it probably helped because it created word-of-mouth marketing and people who really loved a game actually went and bought it after trying the pirated one”.
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It seems like it’s inevitable that all media companies eventually drink their own cool aid and mistake the “losses” that they conjure up out of thin air for lobbying purposes as actual missed sales that they could capture.
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