This seems like a reasonable middle ground. I'm almost embarrassed at the number of people sharing my password.
I hope Netflix can survive their dwindling subscriber growth. They were the ones who kicked off the streaming era, and they've continually put out great original content. They've certainly made some missteps (cancelling great series and overpaying for content) but TV would be worse without them.
I don't know if I'd use "continually" versus "throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks". But yes, cancellation is all a part of that model of content creation and curation.
TV would definitely be worse without streaming. That being said, their recent content has been absolute garbage. Contrived writing, poor directing, and it feels like everything is social justice tinged. Can't say the same about HBO. Euphoria has a lot of the same themes around sexuality, race, etc. but they're tastefully written rather than forced in because some director needed to fill their DEI quota.
Their moat used to be the streaming platform. Now everyone else has copied it, so content is king.
Someone shares their Netflix with me, the only thing I watched in last 3 months was Jackass 4.5. If I browse, everything there is B or C class content. If I lose access, I lost nothing
> I hope Netflix can survive their dwindling subscriber growth. They were the ones who kicked off the streaming era
Totally agree that they kicked off the streaming area; and with those missteps, have provided ample source material in which competitors can improve on. They have successfully captured as much market as one could reasonably expect and it would be good for the market if they had an contender in the space.
Personally, I think users should be able to pass around their passwords as much as they want. Netflix can't lose revenue if it was never going to be bought by the party using the password anyway. I understand account restrictions and the terms of use can explicitly outline that it is not allowed; but I'm paying for your service, I'll use it how I want, respectfully.
I wouldn't be so quick to explain the country list like that.
Sometimes, companies choose to launch features at specific locations that serve as a good proxy for adoption in other areas.
Where I live in Brazil, companies constantly launch different brands of products like sodas or snacks NOT because they don't want to disrupt other more demanding markets, but because my city has a very demanding market itself. If the product sticks here it is a good proxy that it will be successful everywhere else, because we are seen as hard to adopt new ideas. Go figure.
I am not saying that this is the case here, only offering a different hypothesis. Maybe those countries offer the exact configuration of demographics, content consumption profile and account sharing habits that would make for a good proxy as to whether the new paid sharing features would work well elsewhere.
They're not going to run tests in a market they don't think is predictive of a broader population. Also, US-centric companies tend to be US-centric. (Netflix is based in Silicon Valley.) Running a test in a small Latin American economy feels less risky than somewhere like the US (or even Europe), where mistakes will be loudly noticed by personal social ties and the English-speaking media at large.
Start with a small market and expand from there. When I worked on online services for a FAANG we would regularly roll out new features to large markets to test before going global. Brazil was always a great option to get a lot of folks and good feedback.
Family accounts are inherently blurry. There are families where someone moves out (e.g. a teenager graduates) or lives outside the home (e.g. Grandma's in a nursing home). Some groups of friends get together, call themselves a family, and pitch in for an account. Some families spent the summer in a cabin. Some people are away from home for more than 2 weeks at a time (traveling through many destinations). IDK how they support multiple profiles in a way that's fair to everyone.
I will say that Netflix hasn't added much value to my life over the past years. Most of my watching has either been with other people (e.g. going to a friend/family member's house and casting from my account), or on an airplane. My parents and my brother have profiles on my account - we live apart, but we're still a family.
My main motivator for keeping my Netflix subscription is not interrupting my family members when they do want to watch something. If Netflix starts charging per "house" that you login from, I'm canceling my account.
Bingo. I just keep it because my parents and in-laws use it sometimes. If they’re going to tell me they can’t login from a different house, its adios Netflix for me. Neither my parents or in laws care enough to pay for their own subscription.
If I visit my in-laws house for a few days, which is a common occurrence, am I unable to watch my Netflix account on one of their TVs? It sounds like I would be restricted to only mobile devices.
I pay for two streams; I'm going to use two streams however I please. If Netflix doesn't like it they can kick me off and I'll go back to pirating their content. Either way I'm not bothered.
You don't pay for two streams, you pay for two streams at one address in conformance with their Terms of Service. That of course has nothing to do with whether you pirate their content or not.
People do pay for two streams and expect to watch them anywhere. That has been the de facto way to use netflix ever since its inception and it also goes for other streaming services.
This is the expectation of service. Nobody cares about terms of service.
Even that's being generous. My expectation of service reflects the situation as it existed when I signed up: half the current price with about three times as many shows that I cared about watching.
>That has been the de facto way to use netflix ever since its inception
The pedantic me wants to remind you that the original way to watch Netflix was to have DVDs delivered to your home. That was the original inception. By developing their backend so that streaming on the internet became so ubiquitous, they dug their own grave. All of the studios got to sit back and watch (popcorn included) as Netflix paved the way by doing all of the expensive R&D, find all the gotchas in delivering video to shitty home connections, mobile, etc. Once it was stable and established, all of the studios said thanks, hired people away, and built their own. They then took their ball and went home to their own platforms. Meanwhile, Netflix has pretty much been thrown a haymaker leaving them in standing knockout.
You say that like you know they didn't. Studios were never going to license their content for that long of a period. NEVER. They all knew what the ultimate plans were, and were not going to shoot thier plans full of holes by locking their content out of their own platforms.
Can you point me towards where that is in their TOS? I skimmed through and the only spacial restrictions I saw were
a) No playing content in public in a way that would be interpreted as a public
b) Most (but not necessarily all) of your consumption should be in the same country as your billing address. They seem to implicitly support not just streaming outside of your home, but even outside of your home country:
"You may access Netflix content primarily within the country in which you have established your account and only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such content."
What's the difference between 3 kids and a parent watching 4 streams in a single house, and 3 adult kids at college watching on their parent's 4-streams account?
It was one thing when the 'household' thing was a requirement by antiquated license agreements.
The ONLY reason my family still has Netflix is that it is partially subsidized by our family T-Mobile plan.
This is not going to go well for them, and they know it, which is why they are trialing it in non-US territories first.
When are large companies going to learn that there's an inflection point at which continuing to chase quarterly growth for shareholder expectations crosses over into a landmine field of short term optimizations at long term consequence?
Netflix's idiocy here recently pushed me to setup my home server with Radarr/Sonarr and Plex. Super easy to use, my non-technical girlfriend has downloaded shows and movies she wanted to watch.
We still pay for Disney+ and Binge as they still make it easy to use and have the content we want.
I don't mind paying for stuff. I do mind them squeezing us for every drop they can. It's their prerogative as a company, of course, but if they make it harder than pirating their content, then pirating their content is how it will be for a lot of people.
Especially considering, at least for our household, Netflix does not provide enough value in terms of content we want to watch to be worth paying extra for.
What is the advantage of using Radarr over just directly downloading? Sonarr makes sense, since there are on going seasons that can be automatically picked up.
Is there really enough anticipation of a single movie to want to set it up ahead of time? Or is there something else that makes it great?
To give my non-technical partner a simple web interface to open on her iPad to download a movie (I forget what the interface is, it sits on top of Radarr and Sonarr)
Yeah, I honestly thought The premium plan was kind of intended for sharing, which is why I pay for it. In fact, the only reason I still have Netflix is so that my folks can use it and so that my kids can watch Sing 2 on repeat. If I have to pay more to use the 4-screen plan on 2 screens that happen to not be colocated, then I’ll just buy the movie and mom will have to find the great british baking show elsewhere. Sorry mom.
I predict a massive backfire on this one.. I know Netflix is struggling but as competitors (see HBOMax) get better and better now is not the time to both raise prices and give people a reason to revisit their active subscription. I know plenty of people who only continue to pay for Netflix because they share it with a bunch of people. They don’t really have any killer content right now and as far as I can tell no streaming service has figured out how to deal with people who just cycle between services… This is not the right problem to focus on right now.
> First we payed for screens, now we need to pay for homes, then what?
>What will they invent to take more money from us?
You never paid "for screens" (ie. unrestricted access except for number of screens).
>4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through our service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household. [...]
What's the breakdown of complainers? Is it mostly paying subscribers who intend to cancel because their parents can't watch for free? Or is it mostly non paying viewers who will do nothing as their parents continue to pay for a subscription they no longer access?
Rocking the boat is probably a bad idea for Netflix. If they start sparking family discussions about usage, a lot of families will have moments where everyone says "I thought you were using it." And then they just cancel rather than absorb the multi-home price hike for a service they hardly use.
Exactly. See other comments in this thread, people saying "The only reason I haven't cancelled Netflix already is because I'm pretty sure my brother in law is using it".
I downgraded to the $9.99/month SD one screen option because I asked and no one else was watching at all and now I'm rethinking even continuing with that. The upcoming ad-supported tier might be an option but I suspect many subscriptions will become very ephemeral.
It prompted me to pull up the handy "recent device streaming activity" tab and it turns out my brother is still using it, so I guess the subscription lives another day (at least until they try to start charging per location).
That's the thing - you're probably not going to broach the subject with your brother as long as it doesn't really impact you at all. If Netflix tightens the screws, now you have an uncomfortable situation to deal with.
The smart move for Netflix would have been to silently transition the "freeloaders" to the ad-supported plan. They should have just done that without all of the dicking around in South America and under the radar. Freeloaders start seeing ads with a friendly link to upgrade to the paid plan. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but Netflix gets paid either way.
> Is it mostly paying subscribers who intend to cancel because their parents can't watch for free?
No one is watching for free, someone is paying as the plan is limited to 4 simultaneous streams. Why does it matter that my daughter is watching from college?
You can't be handing your password out to hundreds of people and have no one paying, as there is already a limitation on the number of users for an account and that includes mobile devices.
I canceled when they last raised prices. So far I haven't heard anything that would bring me back.
I did not share my password and Generally only watched on one screen. I'm sure they can tell. But they just kept jacking the prices up while lots of content went to other streaming services. The Balkanization of TV content.
Yeah, same here. It turns out that data-driven, 'viral-focused'[1] TV content is just not enough to justify a price increase over the media giants that have huge back catalogs to depend on. They are a content company trying to behave like a tech company.
[1] Drive to Survive is a good example of this - once a year bait to get people back. I imagine there are similar single-show subscribers in other genres that cancel immediately after.
>They are a content company trying to behave like a tech company.
I'd say that it originally was reversed. With the advent of streaming, they saw the writing on the wall that all studios would prefer to have their content on their own platform. Like, duh! So in order to combat the loss of that back catalog content, they had to become a content company. They just can't compete as well now that everyone has their own platform that needs content.
It's a risk. You green light something that sounds like it could do well only for it to totally bomb. You cancel and cut your losses when it's not an obvious winner. It's a bummer for those slow burn type of shows that get better in season 2+, but bean counters don't consider that. Then again, writers need to know this going in and not make them such a slow burn unless there's guarantee of enough time. I don't envy, but I am finding I watch less and less of their content.
I'd be easier to understand if it was just back to 'single screen' accounts, no simultaneous viewing on the one account though fuzzy ideas of families and houses.
If I can’t use my Netflix subscription (on a TV) when staying in an AirBnb or similar when traveling, I’ll just cancel it. This seems to be such a straightforward use case that I can’t believe they’ll risk angering their customers over this.
Uhoh, Netflix is in trouble. Lots of people are cancelling because they don't like the price, now their solution is to start cracking down and charging more. This will be a long slow decline where competition fights its way in.
The hard part for corporations to understand and get behind, is cheap is better, coming in at a very low prices picks up lots of people and goodwill, and starves competition.
Netflix used to be the example of low price for great value.
Here's what I don't get... there's more media than EVER in history (well, by definition there always will be). Netflix started out as a place I could get any movie. I remember my neighbor got "Kellys Heros" in the mail from Netflix and we ate Chinese Food. I felt bad but they offered it. In my family we had no TV and NEVER got takeout. To this day, it's one of my favorite flicks.
So many films, so cheaply to be had. Clint Eastwood did what, 500 films? Surely they can fill up a good catalog.
All this spending on Netflix's own studio is ludicrous cheap-money investment banking startup lunacy.
Just give me a big catalog of films, and give me all the stupid tv shows too. MASH, The Office, whatever. Pay HBO for sopranos and move on.
Or, just be a carrier. That's what Netflix is good at. Delivering reliable and easy to access, good quality streaming. Don't worry about the rest. I love my Roku because I can search and it'll tell me what service has the film or show I want to see. There's a good number of Cary Grant films I get for free consistently.
All that to say, Netflix seems to spend money on stupid stuff.
Which is why they should focus on being a carrier. Get the netflix catalog + if you want HBO you cant get a package for X price. Their expertise is in streaming. They should have been selling the technology stack to Paramount, Disney, CBS, whoever.
I think Amazon might be doing what you're describing. You can sign up for Showtime, Starz, AMC, etc inside of Prime Video and get all the content in one interface. But HBO for example has pulled their stuff, so sometimes companies just don't want to play together.
Edit: You know who else is doing this? Cable companies! You can sign up for HBO and get that content right in your Xfinity app, or search/browse on your set-top box and stream "on demand".
I’ve seen a lot of negativity about Netflix’s library lately in quite a few comments. And I just don’t quite get it. Netflix is still the one service I don’t even consider canceling, because of the breadth of the library: they have American sci-fi, Korean dramas, Danish comedy, and Japanese anime. Hollywood movies now are all the same — especially the superhero movies — but international stuff is different. Am I just on the long tail?
I think its a recency bias. Netflix has produced some very good content in the past like House of Cards, Dark, and Black Mirror, but recently it has not produced anything noteworthy at all.
Personally, the fact they havent even made a new season of Black Mirror in years is offensive enough to me. Like its such a cultural hit. Double down and make more of that instead of giving us dumb stuff like the Floor is Lava.
Calling it a recency bias implies that people are incorrectly concluding Netflix doesn't produce good content because they are biased to think of recent productions. But Netflix subscribers pay monthly, they are entitled to continual good content. If you've already seen the good stuff Netflix has made, why would you keep paying for the trash?
I think it’s more likely that the Netflix algorithm has failed you than you having seen all the good content. Have you seen Borgen and Hotel del Luna and Shaun the Sheep and Midnight Diner and Kath & Kim? Have you even heard of any of them?
Those are all different genres, made in different countries. Algorithms tend to want to match us to more of the same. But just because I like South Park does not mean I want to see a bunch of manatee jokes on Family Guy, right?
No, I don't subscribe to Netflix or watch their content. I just think it's not correct to say that it's a "recency bias" if someone complains that Netflix has bad content.
Bias may be the wrong word but i didnt intend to make it sound like an excuse for Netflix - just a reason why consumers think Netflix sucks. Trust me, i have cancelled Netflix precisely because it has stopped producing as much good content.
Technically, wasn't Black Mirror a BBC production, but then Netflix paid to have an additional season made. Plus, a holiday special IIRC. If you can't get the original production peeps to do more Black Mirror, then it's not really going to be the same. Something along the lines of maybe, but at that point, it's not the same so why bother?
> Personally, the fact they havent even made a new season of Black Mirror in years is offensive enough to me. Like its such a cultural hit. Double down and make more of that instead of giving us dumb stuff like the Floor is Lava.
This is due to a row over rights as well as Charlie Brooker's working on other things and hesitancy to create a new series in the first place. But a new series did get announced last month, so...
I much prefer the "British model" of slow releases over longer spans of time to the "American model" of just endlessly cranking out stuff like a factory.
> Lots of people are cancelling because they don't like the price
I think people are cancelling because Netflix gets boring after some time. When I first got Netflix it seemed to good to be true: So much stuff to watch instantly!
But after some time you realise that they use all kinds of tricks to make it seem like they have more content than they do (eg. different thumbnails for the same film), they don't have a list of their films anywhere, etc.
Their recommendation engine feels like it's written by a 3rd grader (you watched a Zombie movie? let me recommend exclusively zombie movies!)
In the end I just realised I rarely watch anything on Netflix anymore, and cancelled the subscription. I don't think the price was important for my decision, I don't even remember how much I paid for Netflix.
Much more has been lost from Netflix than gained, their catalog used to be much bigger before everyone split off to their own service. There used to be much more to watch instantly, and anything in particular you wanted to see was more likely to be there in the past.
Netflix is facing an existential threat: they own basically no durable, quality content licenses. Their early streaming ascendancy was finally eclipsed by the logical conclusion of... each and every content owner building their own competing streaming service, and removing the content from Netflix. So Netflix, which used to be this phenomenal value where, for one $15 or so/mo fee, you could watch a _ton_ of the shows you loved, along with some of their new and interesting original content... now just has... that new and a lot of times not interesting original content.
Being able to obviously read the tea leaves, they started investing insane gobs of money: $17 billion on content in FY21, $18B this year. (It's not clear to me what the breakdown is of that amount on original content vs licensed content.)
But content is all they have. It's all they _can_ have. It's all any of these streaming services can have, but the rest are not purely streaming businesses. Disney is going to spend $33B this year (though $11B of that is sports rights via ESPN). And Disney has... the entire Disney catalog, as well as Marvel AND Star Wars, analogs to which Netflix has precisely zero of. (Disney doesn't even anticipate + being profitable until 2024 at earliest, which is really saying something.)
So it becomes a question of, can you make it back on volume? Can you outrun the giant boulder? And more importantly, is there anything about Netflix that positions them to manage this risk better than any of their competitors? HBOMax has the WB portfolio AND HBO portfolio. Disney is Disney. Peacock is attached to a cable/internet conglomerate and television studio.
I genuinely don't know if their way out here is to keep throwing $20M per special to the likes of Dave Chappell and Louis CK. Investments like Stranger Things feel like a better ROI, especially once you know you have a following, and arguably no one has better data insight than Netflix but I think content costs have spiraled, Netflix is temperamental and sometimes cancels fan favorite series, and sometimes funds series' that make no sense or are effectively obviously clickbait ("How to Build A Sex Room", "Too Hot to Handle", what is this, Cinemax?)
But then, they stumble on the odd mega-hit, like Tiger King or Squid Game or Bridgerton or The Crown. Not even odd hits, then. They do produce hits, and good content. But the question is, is the model itself sustainable? Can you be a pure streaming studio, where your subscriber base outpaces your content and tech costs? That's been the case historically; they've been profitable. But more and more, people are consolidating accounts, leaving after bingeing the few shows they care about, and abandoning Netflix, and Netflix doesn't have a capacious room of other business models they're attached to.
And people are weird creatures. There are plenty of people who consider immediate access to Friends or The Office to be deeply compelling reasons _alone_ to maintain their HBO or Peacock subscription. We know that because Netflix paid $100M for a single additional year of Friends _alone_. And literally $500 MILLION dollars for 5 years of Seinfeld. What's it say about the model that they know that it's worth it to pay half a billion dollars on a single property for all of five years, domestic only? Woof.
If I were Netflix I'd just let people upload Netflix Shorts, add it as a tab or button on the home page and give the creator a percentage based on viewing time, and build a recommendation algorithm to feed viewers the shorts. Netflix needs more content.
What if they went the other way, reduced the price and lowered restrictions to the point where, in a world with numerous alternatives, people keep their service simply because it's inexpensive?
Because what they're doing now isn't going to work (for me).
Same here. They're already the most expensive and now they want to remove the features that made us love them. Original series we love? Lets cancel all of them. Sharing screens? Oh god the horror, god forbid people share what they pay for. Binge watching? No no no, we will go back to cable and drip feed you episodes.
I bet disney infiltrated their exec ranks and are pushing these ideas to sabotage them.
> Binge watching? No no no, we will go back to cable and drip feed you episodes.
Did they change this recently? Netflix has always done a season dump in my experience. While I like it personally, I kind of think it's a mistake because it reduces the "water cooler" discussions that keep the property in the public consciousness for longer and allow it to build up a following.
This is so ridiculous. They already charge for screens, its clear and we all know it. The fact that now they want to limit where those screens are is purely a transparent money grab with no technological basis.
Its like they WANT people to hate them. They're the most expensive option already, if they can't make it work without extracting more value then they're 100% going to go under.
> Over the last 15 years, we’ve worked hard to build a streaming service that’s easy to use, including for people who travel or live together. It’s great that our members love Netflix movies and TV shows so much they want to share them more broadly. But today’s widespread account sharing between households undermines our long term ability to invest in and improve our service.
> We value our members, and recognize that they have many entertainment choices. So we’re working hard to make great TV shows and films, and to be as thoughtful as possible about how we charge for use across multiple homes. We will be notifying members in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala by email and on Netflix. For more information, visit our help center.
After reading the first ten words of these paragraphs, it's obvious you don't need to read any further. Might be fun to make an AI that strips out junk/corporate filler.
Literally the only thing stopping me from cancelling Netflix is that I'd be cutting off my sister. If they do that for me, I'm out. Their catalog is pitiful and their new content is so often so terrible it's become a meme. The saddest thing is that there's really innovative projects that will suffer without their funding. Like Love Death and Robots. But even in interviews they say it's unsustainable.
It would be an amazing act of caste system creation if they subsidized the major markets by charging only smaller markets paid sharing from now on. I mean how much more obvious is it that they know this is a bad move?
“We used to scale simultaneous streaming with your Netflix plan tier. We now want you to give us more money for that feature, so we are going to gaslight you into thinking you were never supposed to share simultaneous streams with anyone but yourself. To do this, we will rename it a “homes” feature, and pretend the page you used to use to manage logins is new and justifies the price increase. But in reality, we can’t compete, we’ve already done as many explicit rate increases as our users will tolerate, and feel now is a good time to blame inflation for a blatant money grab.”
That’s not really fair. They’ve been relaxed about account sharing historically as I assume the metrics were more important than the revenue.
However, they really do have the moral and legal right to put an end to it at the moment of their choosing. In what world is it reasonable to pay once then share the service with 2/3/4 households?
>In what world is it reasonable to pay once then share the service with 2/3/4 households?
Perhaps the one where the plan I pay extra for says I can use it on up to four devices at once, which is literally in the first paragraph of their help page for plans (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926)
Interpretation in which we or some of us can travel for holiday and watch netfix is 100% reasonable interpretation. Having accounts limited to one place is beyond absurd.
I don’t think bringing morality into a discussion about a public corporation trying to make more money is helpful. The owners are abstract from it enough that they only care that share price go up.
> In what world is it reasonable to pay once then share the service with 2/3/4 households?
In the world where it was an explicit feature in the top tier plan I already pay for.
Nah. When they made it “if you want the highest quality please buy two more streams to get it” everyone read “it’s reasonable to pay more for more streams and higher quality” then got groups together to use that.
Netflix has made too many errors on the path to short-term value/quarterly numbers, from failing to sign longer-term deals (and thus enabling the creation of their current competitors in the first place) to repeatedly raising prices without making whatever their value proposition actually is much clearer to consumers.
One might say it’s a house of cards, and right now random cards are being pulled out while they wonder if they can fix their mistakes before they “find out”.
The hype for Netflix stock was based on them becoming the Spotify of video and a tech advantage in streaming. It became clear a while ago that the studios wouldn't allow this and they no longer have a tech advantage. The market is finally adjusting their stock to match reality.
Now they are fighting a battle they can't win. HBO, Disney, etc. have huge back catalogs that immediately makes their streaming services more valuable, in addition to all the new content they make.
They shouldn't have given up so quickly on physical media. Physical media does not have the licensing issues. They could've invested heavily like the way Amazon did on lowering delivery time. Maybe they could've gotten physical media delivery down to one hour or same day. This would counter the studios back catalog because while Disney can instantly stream their back catalog, it's only Disney. Netflix would have access to back catalogs of all studios (at the tradeoff of waiting for the physical media) That's a tradeoff that many customers would make (access to more back catalog diversity in exchange for the delay of waiting for disks).
At the same time, they could produce streaming content with a different business model. How many times do customers complain about favorite shows getting canceled after a season? What if there was a way for customers to select which shows they want supported? Like pick your top five every month and your subscription money will go to that show.
Instead, they went the route of just spending a lot of money making new content as if they're a studio. But they can't beat the studios at being a studio, Disney and the others are the best at that.
I don't know why you're being downvoted; this seems at least plausible. In this scenario Netflix would still have dominated streaming over the past number of years, so they would have had a huge platform from which to pitch their parallel physical media service. Given its infinite selection, it's at least possible it could have caused a substantial number of people to hold onto their players.
It's a dying medium. The foundations have moved; internet got insanely cheap and fast, if Netflix hadn't done this somebody has would have eaten their lunch.
Can't believe I didn't think of this. They could have been for rental stores what UberEats is for restaurants. Instead, they killed off the video rental stores.
I don't understand the anti-Netflix hate. If you don't like their catalog, you have lots of options.
Password sharing is the rampant default. It's not just grandma in the home or your daughter at college. It's your friends, your exes, your old housemates. Netflix has been, IMO, remarkably chill about this for a very long time. Y'all are talking like they are audaciously stealing something you believe that you are owed.
I think that what got lost along the way is that Netflix forgot what their real product innovation was: long-tail convenience. Whether being able to order from a massive catalog of DVDs or stream things in hi-def without having to worry about torrents or FTP servers, Netflix really changed the way we access media.
They've also played a massive role in popularizing alternative comedy to the masses. Same with documentaries, to a different degree.
I do think they've made some questionable content production decisions. It's highly likely that if they'd stuck to financing comedy specials, documentaries and bringing back shows like Arrested Development and Firefly, they might not have scared Disney, Amazon, HBO and Hulu into competing with them. Their greed made it impossible for the incumbents to not compete.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadI hope Netflix can survive their dwindling subscriber growth. They were the ones who kicked off the streaming era, and they've continually put out great original content. They've certainly made some missteps (cancelling great series and overpaying for content) but TV would be worse without them.
Their moat used to be the streaming platform. Now everyone else has copied it, so content is king.
Check out the Dave Chappelle controversy. Likely that will change your opinion of Netflix as a PC-obsessed company.
Totally agree that they kicked off the streaming area; and with those missteps, have provided ample source material in which competitors can improve on. They have successfully captured as much market as one could reasonably expect and it would be good for the market if they had an contender in the space.
Personally, I think users should be able to pass around their passwords as much as they want. Netflix can't lose revenue if it was never going to be bought by the party using the password anyway. I understand account restrictions and the terms of use can explicitly outline that it is not allowed; but I'm paying for your service, I'll use it how I want, respectfully.
Agree with the first bit, but now their content is the text definition of Sturgeon's Law.
Sometimes, companies choose to launch features at specific locations that serve as a good proxy for adoption in other areas.
Where I live in Brazil, companies constantly launch different brands of products like sodas or snacks NOT because they don't want to disrupt other more demanding markets, but because my city has a very demanding market itself. If the product sticks here it is a good proxy that it will be successful everywhere else, because we are seen as hard to adopt new ideas. Go figure.
I am not saying that this is the case here, only offering a different hypothesis. Maybe those countries offer the exact configuration of demographics, content consumption profile and account sharing habits that would make for a good proxy as to whether the new paid sharing features would work well elsewhere.
They're not going to run tests in a market they don't think is predictive of a broader population. Also, US-centric companies tend to be US-centric. (Netflix is based in Silicon Valley.) Running a test in a small Latin American economy feels less risky than somewhere like the US (or even Europe), where mistakes will be loudly noticed by personal social ties and the English-speaking media at large.
I will say that Netflix hasn't added much value to my life over the past years. Most of my watching has either been with other people (e.g. going to a friend/family member's house and casting from my account), or on an airplane. My parents and my brother have profiles on my account - we live apart, but we're still a family.
My main motivator for keeping my Netflix subscription is not interrupting my family members when they do want to watch something. If Netflix starts charging per "house" that you login from, I'm canceling my account.
They piloted this change in my home country and there are families that live in different countries…
People do pay for two streams and expect to watch them anywhere. That has been the de facto way to use netflix ever since its inception and it also goes for other streaming services.
This is the expectation of service. Nobody cares about terms of service.
The pedantic me wants to remind you that the original way to watch Netflix was to have DVDs delivered to your home. That was the original inception. By developing their backend so that streaming on the internet became so ubiquitous, they dug their own grave. All of the studios got to sit back and watch (popcorn included) as Netflix paved the way by doing all of the expensive R&D, find all the gotchas in delivering video to shitty home connections, mobile, etc. Once it was stable and established, all of the studios said thanks, hired people away, and built their own. They then took their ball and went home to their own platforms. Meanwhile, Netflix has pretty much been thrown a haymaker leaving them in standing knockout.
a) No playing content in public in a way that would be interpreted as a public
b) Most (but not necessarily all) of your consumption should be in the same country as your billing address. They seem to implicitly support not just streaming outside of your home, but even outside of your home country:
"You may access Netflix content primarily within the country in which you have established your account and only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such content."
What's the difference between 3 kids and a parent watching 4 streams in a single house, and 3 adult kids at college watching on their parent's 4-streams account?
It was one thing when the 'household' thing was a requirement by antiquated license agreements.
The ONLY reason my family still has Netflix is that it is partially subsidized by our family T-Mobile plan.
This is not going to go well for them, and they know it, which is why they are trialing it in non-US territories first.
When are large companies going to learn that there's an inflection point at which continuing to chase quarterly growth for shareholder expectations crosses over into a landmine field of short term optimizations at long term consequence?
We still pay for Disney+ and Binge as they still make it easy to use and have the content we want.
I don't mind paying for stuff. I do mind them squeezing us for every drop they can. It's their prerogative as a company, of course, but if they make it harder than pirating their content, then pirating their content is how it will be for a lot of people.
Especially considering, at least for our household, Netflix does not provide enough value in terms of content we want to watch to be worth paying extra for.
Is there really enough anticipation of a single movie to want to set it up ahead of time? Or is there something else that makes it great?
I don't track new releases, they just show up on my Plex when I have them. It's convenient and I don't have to go looking for them.
You can allow requests to be automatically filled, or require approval.
[1] https://jellyfin.org
What will they invent to take more money from us?
Interesting how companies invent new ways to take our money as consumers and also invent new ways to pay us less money as employees.
I won't give my money to them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
>What will they invent to take more money from us?
You never paid "for screens" (ie. unrestricted access except for number of screens).
>4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through our service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household. [...]
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180613033307/https://help.netf...
I downgraded to the $9.99/month SD one screen option because I asked and no one else was watching at all and now I'm rethinking even continuing with that. The upcoming ad-supported tier might be an option but I suspect many subscriptions will become very ephemeral.
The smart move for Netflix would have been to silently transition the "freeloaders" to the ad-supported plan. They should have just done that without all of the dicking around in South America and under the radar. Freeloaders start seeing ads with a friendly link to upgrade to the paid plan. Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but Netflix gets paid either way.
> Is it mostly paying subscribers who intend to cancel because their parents can't watch for free?
No one is watching for free, someone is paying as the plan is limited to 4 simultaneous streams. Why does it matter that my daughter is watching from college?
You can't be handing your password out to hundreds of people and have no one paying, as there is already a limitation on the number of users for an account and that includes mobile devices.
I did not share my password and Generally only watched on one screen. I'm sure they can tell. But they just kept jacking the prices up while lots of content went to other streaming services. The Balkanization of TV content.
[1] Drive to Survive is a good example of this - once a year bait to get people back. I imagine there are similar single-show subscribers in other genres that cancel immediately after.
I'd say that it originally was reversed. With the advent of streaming, they saw the writing on the wall that all studios would prefer to have their content on their own platform. Like, duh! So in order to combat the loss of that back catalog content, they had to become a content company. They just can't compete as well now that everyone has their own platform that needs content.
I think they are limiting the number of TVs that can use the app, and then they will continue the quality downgrades on the non-TV platforms.
The hard part for corporations to understand and get behind, is cheap is better, coming in at a very low prices picks up lots of people and goodwill, and starves competition.
Netflix used to be the example of low price for great value.
So many films, so cheaply to be had. Clint Eastwood did what, 500 films? Surely they can fill up a good catalog.
All this spending on Netflix's own studio is ludicrous cheap-money investment banking startup lunacy.
Just give me a big catalog of films, and give me all the stupid tv shows too. MASH, The Office, whatever. Pay HBO for sopranos and move on.
Or, just be a carrier. That's what Netflix is good at. Delivering reliable and easy to access, good quality streaming. Don't worry about the rest. I love my Roku because I can search and it'll tell me what service has the film or show I want to see. There's a good number of Cary Grant films I get for free consistently.
All that to say, Netflix seems to spend money on stupid stuff.
Edit: You know who else is doing this? Cable companies! You can sign up for HBO and get that content right in your Xfinity app, or search/browse on your set-top box and stream "on demand".
Personally, the fact they havent even made a new season of Black Mirror in years is offensive enough to me. Like its such a cultural hit. Double down and make more of that instead of giving us dumb stuff like the Floor is Lava.
Those are all different genres, made in different countries. Algorithms tend to want to match us to more of the same. But just because I like South Park does not mean I want to see a bunch of manatee jokes on Family Guy, right?
This is due to a row over rights as well as Charlie Brooker's working on other things and hesitancy to create a new series in the first place. But a new series did get announced last month, so...
I much prefer the "British model" of slow releases over longer spans of time to the "American model" of just endlessly cranking out stuff like a factory.
However, their English language catalogue gets worse by the day.
It's not bad if you want full subtitles, if they're available in the language you want. The lack of forced subs however is quite annoying.
I think people are cancelling because Netflix gets boring after some time. When I first got Netflix it seemed to good to be true: So much stuff to watch instantly!
But after some time you realise that they use all kinds of tricks to make it seem like they have more content than they do (eg. different thumbnails for the same film), they don't have a list of their films anywhere, etc.
Their recommendation engine feels like it's written by a 3rd grader (you watched a Zombie movie? let me recommend exclusively zombie movies!)
In the end I just realised I rarely watch anything on Netflix anymore, and cancelled the subscription. I don't think the price was important for my decision, I don't even remember how much I paid for Netflix.
Being able to obviously read the tea leaves, they started investing insane gobs of money: $17 billion on content in FY21, $18B this year. (It's not clear to me what the breakdown is of that amount on original content vs licensed content.)
But content is all they have. It's all they _can_ have. It's all any of these streaming services can have, but the rest are not purely streaming businesses. Disney is going to spend $33B this year (though $11B of that is sports rights via ESPN). And Disney has... the entire Disney catalog, as well as Marvel AND Star Wars, analogs to which Netflix has precisely zero of. (Disney doesn't even anticipate + being profitable until 2024 at earliest, which is really saying something.)
So it becomes a question of, can you make it back on volume? Can you outrun the giant boulder? And more importantly, is there anything about Netflix that positions them to manage this risk better than any of their competitors? HBOMax has the WB portfolio AND HBO portfolio. Disney is Disney. Peacock is attached to a cable/internet conglomerate and television studio.
I genuinely don't know if their way out here is to keep throwing $20M per special to the likes of Dave Chappell and Louis CK. Investments like Stranger Things feel like a better ROI, especially once you know you have a following, and arguably no one has better data insight than Netflix but I think content costs have spiraled, Netflix is temperamental and sometimes cancels fan favorite series, and sometimes funds series' that make no sense or are effectively obviously clickbait ("How to Build A Sex Room", "Too Hot to Handle", what is this, Cinemax?)
But then, they stumble on the odd mega-hit, like Tiger King or Squid Game or Bridgerton or The Crown. Not even odd hits, then. They do produce hits, and good content. But the question is, is the model itself sustainable? Can you be a pure streaming studio, where your subscriber base outpaces your content and tech costs? That's been the case historically; they've been profitable. But more and more, people are consolidating accounts, leaving after bingeing the few shows they care about, and abandoning Netflix, and Netflix doesn't have a capacious room of other business models they're attached to.
And people are weird creatures. There are plenty of people who consider immediate access to Friends or The Office to be deeply compelling reasons _alone_ to maintain their HBO or Peacock subscription. We know that because Netflix paid $100M for a single additional year of Friends _alone_. And literally $500 MILLION dollars for 5 years of Seinfeld. What's it say about the model that they know that it's worth it to pay half a billion dollars on a single property for all of five years, domestic only? Woof.
Because what they're doing now isn't going to work (for me).
I bet disney infiltrated their exec ranks and are pushing these ideas to sabotage them.
Did they change this recently? Netflix has always done a season dump in my experience. While I like it personally, I kind of think it's a mistake because it reduces the "water cooler" discussions that keep the property in the public consciousness for longer and allow it to build up a following.
Its like they WANT people to hate them. They're the most expensive option already, if they can't make it work without extracting more value then they're 100% going to go under.
> We value our members, and recognize that they have many entertainment choices. So we’re working hard to make great TV shows and films, and to be as thoughtful as possible about how we charge for use across multiple homes. We will be notifying members in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala by email and on Netflix. For more information, visit our help center.
After reading the first ten words of these paragraphs, it's obvious you don't need to read any further. Might be fun to make an AI that strips out junk/corporate filler.
Oh, a title like this is never good news...
“We used to scale simultaneous streaming with your Netflix plan tier. We now want you to give us more money for that feature, so we are going to gaslight you into thinking you were never supposed to share simultaneous streams with anyone but yourself. To do this, we will rename it a “homes” feature, and pretend the page you used to use to manage logins is new and justifies the price increase. But in reality, we can’t compete, we’ve already done as many explicit rate increases as our users will tolerate, and feel now is a good time to blame inflation for a blatant money grab.”
However, they really do have the moral and legal right to put an end to it at the moment of their choosing. In what world is it reasonable to pay once then share the service with 2/3/4 households?
Perhaps the one where the plan I pay extra for says I can use it on up to four devices at once, which is literally in the first paragraph of their help page for plans (https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926)
To stretch this to entire different households sharing passwords was never a reasonable interpretation.
I don’t think bringing morality into a discussion about a public corporation trying to make more money is helpful. The owners are abstract from it enough that they only care that share price go up.
> In what world is it reasonable to pay once then share the service with 2/3/4 households?
In the world where it was an explicit feature in the top tier plan I already pay for.
For Netflix to ask you to stop seems a perfectly reasonable ask regardless of how you label it.
Netflix has made too many errors on the path to short-term value/quarterly numbers, from failing to sign longer-term deals (and thus enabling the creation of their current competitors in the first place) to repeatedly raising prices without making whatever their value proposition actually is much clearer to consumers.
One might say it’s a house of cards, and right now random cards are being pulled out while they wonder if they can fix their mistakes before they “find out”.
Now they are fighting a battle they can't win. HBO, Disney, etc. have huge back catalogs that immediately makes their streaming services more valuable, in addition to all the new content they make.
They shouldn't have given up so quickly on physical media. Physical media does not have the licensing issues. They could've invested heavily like the way Amazon did on lowering delivery time. Maybe they could've gotten physical media delivery down to one hour or same day. This would counter the studios back catalog because while Disney can instantly stream their back catalog, it's only Disney. Netflix would have access to back catalogs of all studios (at the tradeoff of waiting for the physical media) That's a tradeoff that many customers would make (access to more back catalog diversity in exchange for the delay of waiting for disks).
At the same time, they could produce streaming content with a different business model. How many times do customers complain about favorite shows getting canceled after a season? What if there was a way for customers to select which shows they want supported? Like pick your top five every month and your subscription money will go to that show.
Instead, they went the route of just spending a lot of money making new content as if they're a studio. But they can't beat the studios at being a studio, Disney and the others are the best at that.
Everyone with a playstation or an xbox has one.
Password sharing is the rampant default. It's not just grandma in the home or your daughter at college. It's your friends, your exes, your old housemates. Netflix has been, IMO, remarkably chill about this for a very long time. Y'all are talking like they are audaciously stealing something you believe that you are owed.
I think that what got lost along the way is that Netflix forgot what their real product innovation was: long-tail convenience. Whether being able to order from a massive catalog of DVDs or stream things in hi-def without having to worry about torrents or FTP servers, Netflix really changed the way we access media.
They've also played a massive role in popularizing alternative comedy to the masses. Same with documentaries, to a different degree.
I do think they've made some questionable content production decisions. It's highly likely that if they'd stuck to financing comedy specials, documentaries and bringing back shows like Arrested Development and Firefly, they might not have scared Disney, Amazon, HBO and Hulu into competing with them. Their greed made it impossible for the incumbents to not compete.