Originally published at: Netflix rolls out its "crackdown" on global password sharing | Boing Boing
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Very little worth watching anymore on Netflix. It’s like I’m just throwing a $20 bill away every month so I’ll probably be one of those “impulsive” cancellations soon. It’s mostly the kids who use our account anyway. Same goes for Paramount+, HBOMax and all of the other seldom used streaming services I have accounts with - most of which I can’t even remember right now.
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I rarely watch stuff on Netflix so the password sharing made sense because i’m hardly on there. But if i’ll now be forced to pay to be able to get on, or be forced to get my own account then i’d rather not use Netflix at all
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For me the smaller specialty channels - Criterion, Night Flight, Shudder, etc - are the ones that still have decent value for money (and quite of few of the free channels on Roku are good, too). I won’t be paying for any of the big five, though.
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It is really a pain. We were sharing my In-Law’s account and are definitely the target of these policies. Both my wife and the kids used the service. We chose to do the little add-on account but you only get one profile so the kiddos lost their access (who is going to tell mommy no Netflix? - not I for sure). The kids still have Disney for now but we are not missing having additional options for the kids.
I think people have little tolerance for needing to pay many services. Most people I know got around it by pooling their resources but cracking down on this community building seems unlikely to increase subscribers in a meaningful way.
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Me and my significant other are currently paying for Paramount+ begrudgingly because we’re wanting to watch some of the newer seasons of Ru Paul’s Drag Race that aren’t available to watch on Hulu. Sometimes my SO will watch things on Netflix but overall our usage isn’t super high, but if we decided to hold onto Netflix it’d be solely for them to use since i do most of my content watching on Youtube and some anime sites.
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Some of my online friends will host screen sharing viewing parties when other folks really want to watch a movie or show, which skirts around some of these password sharing restrictions. Beyond that i can imagine that there will be an uptick on pirated content
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I’m just going to go out on a limb and predict that, with all of the clear ineptitude and anti-customer policies being enacted by major streamers, some company is going to come along with a bundling service that allows you to pick and choose streamers under the same service… probably with ads. So basically, cable again.
I mean, Plex, Apple TV and Amazon are basically all poised to do that any day now.
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This should go well for them.
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That would be Hulu and Amazon. You can already do that.
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Can you add on services through Hulu other than bundling with Disney+ and the utterly useless ESPN+? I realize it draws from a lot of of sources for its content because it originated as a network collaboration, but Amazon and Apple allow you to sub directly from within their walled garden for a lot of external services. Plex has been playing with consolidating all streaming data into one app, but I found it to be too labor intensive to have another platform to manage just for the convenience of having it all in one list.
Hulu has add-ons for Max, Cinemax, Showtime, and Starz. Not sure if the latter 3 even have standalone somewhere, they’re not names I associate with streaming services.
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Now just “max”, as of yesterday.
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That’s pretty much what PlutoTV does already for free (with intrusive ad support). No on-demand access with them, though. Most of their content seems to come from Paramount+ and a several other streamers.
I’m a little fuzzy on when things went from piracy or at least skirting the very edge of it, to community building. Sharing a Netflix password word with others that were never part of your household (college age children and vacation time are somewhat of a gray area for me) seems like straight up piracy IMO. I’m not seeing much difference than your neighbor agreeing to put a splitter into their cable line and let you run coax over to your house (at least back in the 90’s when such things were possible), and then you split the bill.
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Each netflix account comes with X simultaneous streams. You couldn’t use more than that. A splitter adds things that aren’t there. If too many people tried to use a Netflix account at the same time, they’d be blocked.
And don’t forget this:
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“We expect a lot of noise in 2Q23, and are being very conservative in our own modeling of churn in response to password crackdown,” Jefferies wrote in a note to clients late last month.
Wow! Who says that freestyle Beat Poetry is dead?
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I’m aware. I pay for 2 screens and have been blocked when both of my kids are watching (in my physical house). I wouldn’t say that a coax splitter adds things that weren’t there exactly. As far as I know analog cable TV never charged per the television set used, it was charged per household it connected to. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it does represent the sharing of cost over a service where the provider doesn’t know the sharing is occurring. I think +6 years ago Netflix may have viewed the idea of sharing a password more like a “free” trial. I guess it back fired if they expected people to actually buy their own subscription instead of sharing one indefinitely.
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Considering they HAD free trials, this doesn’t fly.
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We used to have to pay per outlet in the house. They had no way to verify. Someone from the cable company came by one day to audit the active outlets. Turns out they had left one connected that we did not use…… h they disconnected the wrong one and left without verification. Took a few days for someone to come back and fix it.
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