I like how they never even say why they send this e-mail. It’s so incredibly passive aggressive. They don’t want to say “the gravy train is over, cough up” but that’s what they actually are saying.
The amount of entertainment I and the three people I share with get out of Netflix isn't worth the 4x cost increase. Maybe the other guys will get accounts, I don't know. I'm sure for some people it's worth it.
It's become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like how people didn't trust Google to keep Stadia running so why would they buy full price games on it? Why would I pay for Netflix and get excited about their shows when so many get canned with no conclusion?
But as more people say that and don't bother watching until there's a whole finished story, then even more shows get canceled earlier because nobody watched the first season.
Aggressively launching lots of shows and canceling the lower performing ones might be a sound financial strategy in the short term, but I don't think it's doing great things for customer goodwill.
> But as more people say that and don't bother watching until there's a whole finished story, then even more shows get canceled earlier because nobody watched the first season.
That's still netflix's fault. They need to stop expecting the world to flock to their newest shows the moment they are released, there's too much competing for our attention, and instead invest in stories and creators they believe in, and make sure that they're always funding and releasing a complete and quality product. It doesn't matter if a show is only one season, so long as that one season has a satisfying conclusion.
Stories written to span multiple seasons are fine too, but they need to commit to seeing that show to its conclusion. Even if a show doesn't perform very well, some percentage of Netflix subscribers will enjoy it making it an asset for their library and on a long enough timescale it'll be worth it, but if they really want to cancel a show before the story has a chance to reasonably end, they'd be better off removing it entirely from their library. Right now their library is filled with shows that will entice new watchers only to piss them off when they learn the plug was pulled early, or which will sit unwatched by the people who have already heard that netflix screwed the show and its fans over and that's a liability.
Totally agree that it's Netflix's fault. I was a Netflix subscriber and bailed when they announced the account sharing restrictions because frankly they don't have the catalog to back up their ever increasing prices. They want $20/month for 4K. If I were going to subscribe to one of the big streaming services again, that's a tough sell against Apple's TV+ at $8/month for 4K and a better track record on show cancellations. Maybe for people who watch a lot more TV than I do it's worth the expense.
The only streaming I'm paying for now is dropout.tv, the little niche service descended from College Humor that only has like 3 shows producing new seasons. But it's consistently great, I'm not worried they're going to cancel after every season, and I'm supporting a small group of creators who all seem like nice people. Win-win-win.
My guess is that startup costs represent the bulk of the cost of a show. Just filming one episode probably costs somewhere on the same order of magnitude as an entire season.
That's self-inflicted. They're the ones who turned themselves into a worldwide known meme. Now they're suffering the consequences of their lack of dedication.
It's not on customers to respect the corporation's whims. Customers vote with their wallets.
I am only keeping my account because of cellular carrier subsidies. If my account gets subject to this notice, then I am definitely canceling. I pay for 4K streaming and simultaneous streams. Viewing should not be constricted to a single IP or address.
If just one of the other three gets an account (which seems statistically likely), it's the same for Netflix.
If two of them get an account, or you change your mind later, it's a huge win for Netflix.
Netflix has done the math and already tested this policy in several countries. They would never be rolling this out in their home market of the US if they weren't extremely confident that new subscriptions will outweigh cancellations.
> If just one of the other three gets an account (which seems statistically likely), it's the same for Netflix.
Not 100%; with less viewers there will be less word of mouth about Netflix shows. Maybe that will be offset by paying less to license third party stuff with less viewers though.
So if they are allowing you to use on devices and networks outside of your home or ones you don't normally use, how are they identifying unique individuals or "households?"
> To verify accounts within the same household, Netflix said they will use information including IP addresses, device IDs and account activity from devices already signed into the Netflix account.
The idea that was floated was that they identify a device that defines the household (e.g. a TV), for example based on being always on the same SSID, or being on a wired connection, or the IP address. Then other devices need to be in the same network as that stable device at least say once a month.
But if that’s really the case you can just use the same SSID on both places, and maybe use the same IP address space and router MAC. If they’re fingerprinting the home network that should do pretty good?
Ha! We used to live with my in-laws and when moving out I setup my SSID to be the same as theirs because who wants to re-authenticate an unreasonably large number of wireless devices?
Possibly, but it seems like this this would be pretty easy to detect.
First, they should already know who has been sharing accounts. You haven't been having other households VPN to your local network for the past 5 years for Netflix. That gives them a great starting point.
They can look at SSIDs and not just your SSID, but all the SSIDs that your device is seeing. Even within a household, not all the SSIDs will be the same from room to room. For most people, there will be some overlap. Sure, maybe you live in a rural area and you're the only SSID around. For most people, it'll be hard to fake this.
Even if you make all the SSIDs look similar, have you dealt with your BSSIDs? BSSIDs can be used to geolocate most people pretty well. Almost no one has opted out of the big WiFi geolocation databases (or even knows they can).
Maybe you could have them VPN into your local network, but they could still use WiFi and other information to see that the connection is actually in a different location. Plus, as I noted, they should already know who has been connecting from multiple locations for years.
It might depend. If you regularly take your work computer home and connect from your home network, it should be fine. Otherwise, Netflix might challenge you and you might be able to verify the device.
Maybe, maybe not. I would think Netflix would have some distance threshold. They may be able to identify that the location you're watching from isn't far from your home. It's not like most people will commute across the country for work, so if you're within a reasonable commute distance they not view that as a problem.
But if you're using a device that's always 4+ hours drive away, I think it's fair game for Netflix to look at that with suspicion.
Also, Netflix could look at viewing habits from different devices. If you watch something from a device at home, and then watch the next episode of that show at work, that's a good indicator that you're the same person using two different devices.
I pay for 2 devices so a friend can use my subscription, though he does not live with me. I watch Netflix once a week for an hour or two, maybe, unless I'm actually binging something. He watches it non-stop pretty much as background noise. I wonder if they will assume he is the main user, even though I pay for it. Will they compare my IP address location with my billing address?
I guess I should have just kept it at 1 device and not tried to pay for my friend's usage.
It shouldn't be that hard to figure this out using a variety of metrics - and remember, they can be pretty cautious in their enforcement and the enforcement doesn't have to be real-time.
For example, Netflix can easily notice that a TV is connecting from AT&T Fiber with one IP and another TV is connecting from Spectrum with a different IP. Many times they're watching at the same time so it's not someone on vacation.
It's relatively easy to note mobile devices like iPhones/Android and they have device IDs. Maybe you could hook your phone up to your TV, but most people aren't going to want to do that to save $8/mo (and walk up to their phone connected to the TV to select a new show or pause it). If the phone is on a WiFi connection (rather than cellular), Netflix can easily see that it's not the same household. People aren't likely to want to pay for a cellular plan (at $25+ per month) to avoid an $8 charge from Netflix.
If you're looking to catch 99% of people and you don't need it to be real-time, this should be pretty easy. Maybe some people will set up home VPNs, but that's going to be a small number of people. Even then, Android devices will give access to WiFi SSIDs in the area and even iOS has a permission to scan for Bluetooth devices which can be used for some amount of locating.
I guess the flip side of your question would be: how would you make it seem like you were connecting from the same household? You'd probably want all devices to be connecting from the same IP address. You'd probably want all devices connecting to the same SSID - and have neighboring SSIDs be the same. You wouldn't want them to see "they're both connecting to XYZ and have the same IP address, but they're each seeing a dozen additional SSIDs and zero overlap - what are the odds of that?" You can control your own SSID, but not all your neighbors' SSIDs.
I don't think Netflix is looking for something foolproof. I'm guessing they're looking for something that will find most instances of sharing while still being cautious enough that they don't bother people who aren't sharing. Even if your IP address is dynamic or CG-NAT, it'll still be the same for all your devices at a given time. Most people have internet from a handful of companies and it isn't that hard to figure out how those ISPs are handling things and accommodate it.
In fact, Netflix doesn't really need to do this blindly. They have logs from years of our usage. They have probably already detected who is using it in multiple locations and that makes it easy to put a flag on the account for the future. This account has been used in multiple locations for the past 3 years, if something looks suspicious, throw up the validation challenge. On other accounts without such a history, they could be more cautious. Netflix probably isn't worried about one month of sharing compared to the ongoing decade-long sharing that they believe is eating into their revenue. They can bide their time.
I'm probably in the minority, but I wish Netflix offered a profile transfer function that allowed me to transfer my profile to another existing account.
I really like the Spotify model, where everyone just has their own account. Then a Family Plan owner invites others to join the plan via their email address.
Honestly, I wouldn't have minded something like "buy an extra member" if it were introduced years ago. Introducing it now just seems to be a trigger to re-evaluate "is Netflix really worth that much" at a time their content selection doesn't look as amazing as it once did. I'm coming from a background of having recently cancelled my account though, and may be biased in thinking along those lines as a result.
Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.
I was probably ~3 years delayed in cancelling Netflix based on actually using it. I started maintaining a watchlist of what I actually want to watch instead of constantly searching/cross-referencing through what is new or currently available on these interfaces designed to hide how little good new content is actually there. Eventually I found out there wasn't really that much I was actually interested in on the services anymore and, for what there was, I came the conclusion pirating was once again the better option in terms of availability, quality, and user experience.
Barring returning to piracy, I think I'd still have cancelled but sometimes subscribed for a month on the rare occasion something like The Queen's Gambit (2020) came out then cancel for a few years again.
Netflix is the one that's probably the most marginal for me these days. I don't really binge watch or drop in and out much but I should probably look with summer coming up to see if I really want it given I have other services and I watch a fairly modest amount of video.
Netflix's selection doesn't really have the staying power of HBO's selection.
HBO has some all-time classics that will be watched and discussed for decades, not just months. Sopranos is still discussed and rewatched and memed. Same with The Wire.
I feel that Netflix's offerings are hot for a few months, then fade from public memory.
I wish they had done this from the get go. My family has never shared a password with anybody, and I'm pretty confident that some of their price hikes reflected the reality that they had to deal with password sharers.
All I know is that with the fracturing of the streaming landscape, where everything requires a separate $8.99/$11.99/$15.99 (or whatever) monthly fee, downloading Linux ISOs starts to look more and more attractive.
It's still declaring an intention to commit a crime either way though, isn't it? Unless you truly believe any prosecutorial organization wouldn't be able to crack the code.
I think they were making a thinly-veiled reference to torrenting (because for a long time the only legit use case for torrenting was Linux images?) but I'm not sure
Talking about it in jokes and codes just strikes me as either immature or ashamed, like how teenagers talk about sex or drugs. I think if they believe what they're doing is justified then they shouldn't be ashamed, and there's no reason to talk in code since that's definitely not protecting them one bit from any sort of legal action.
Should have shared passwords, at least you could trade a Netflix for a Hulu or whatever.
Apple TV is $6.99 a month. Netflix looks to be $9.99 (ignoring the ad-subsidized offering which isn’t really comparable). It is kind of hard to share an Apple TV login (at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to share it without also sharing my whole Apple account), so I guess that extra $3 must be the price of all the sharing going on.
Although, Apple TV seems to have much better in-house shows, so who knows?
It gets a bit more complicated than that, e.g. Apple TV+ doesn't have tiers and the $9.99 Netflix plan won't get you 4k. That said, it's also more complicated than assuming the cost difference is all due to password sharing. Who has the better media agreements? Is a particular player trying to buy market share or focusing on maximizing margin of the share they have? How does having an integrated hardware ecosystem vs partners play into the cost structure? These, and more, can all factor into the subscription price, beyond password sharing.
Maybe a bit off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone else actively avoids 4k? I hate watching content in ultra high resolution. It looks strange and unreal to me (Yes: I've turned off "soap opera mode")
I'm really glad netflix makes it easy to avoid higher resolution versions of their shows =/
Do you have weird post-processing/sharpening on your TV (other than "soap opera mode")? There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K. Your eyes aren't somehow low resolution with 1080p closer to that realism.
>There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K
Yes there is. For one, 90% of non-native 4K is absolute crap. Upscales tend to bludgeon detail even compared to 480p/i sources, and DNR is rather crap, especially on the intense settings companies typically use.
Native 4k can be better, but there’s still so many mastering options that it still causes problems. See Star Wars, LotR, Terminator 2 as all rather controversial 4K releases.
I wonder if this is it. I definitely notice artifacts more in higher resolution.
Low resolution video doesn't bother me at all. I can happily watch 480p. But the weird compression artifacts following moving objects absolutely frustrate and distract me.
Maybe streaming services aren't encoding their higher resolution streams with a sufficient bitrate? Or maybe the higher resolution makes the artifacts more noticeable? Either way, the low resolution experience seems consistently superior.
Nope, and I notice it on my computer monitor as well so I'm sure this isn't the case.
> "There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K. Your eyes aren't somehow low resolution with 1080p closer to that realism."
This is definitely not the case and one of the big reasons is lossy compression. Precision without accuracy can be very noticeable, in terms of artifacting.
>Should have shared passwords, at least you could trade a Netflix for a Hulu or whatever.
Yeah, I fell into the "do the right thing, it will be better" trap.
The modern solution is to sign up for a service, binge watch everything on it, and then cancel. But I don't really binge watch, and we have enough people in the house with different tastes it doesn't really work that well.
What really killed me is I pay for PBS Passport. But there are some shows with different licenses (I guess) that are only available on other services.
> It is kind of hard to share an Apple TV login (at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to share it without also sharing my whole Apple account)
You do it by setting up family sharing. But yeah it's super integrated, you'll be sharing a lot more than just Apple TV+ if you just set it naively.
If the goal is to just share TV+, then maybe a solution could be to create a separate Apple ID just for that, but actually using it will be difficult for Apple users.
My guess is this is Apples probably very successful way of disincentivising "account sharing" (as in, swapping access for your friends Hulu, Netfilx, etc, while enabling actual account sharing within a family)
> Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.
I suspect you're right about this. This change has no effect on the people who aren't sharing their account, so those people have very little incentive to comment except perhaps out of sympathy for those who it will affect. So most of the uproar will understandably be negative, even if a majority of users do not share their account.
These services only have new good content like 50% of the time. So it makes more sense to cycle subscriptions on and off. This is harder if you’ve given someone your password (I’d definitely not be subscribed to Disney+ right now if my sibling wasn’t using it).
I think we're in agreement. I said it doesn't affect people who aren't sharing their password, and you seem to be talking about cases where passwords are being shared.
I suspect most people won’t even realise. I do share mine with my gran who I set up with a smart tv and Internet during Covid because she was stuck in the house on her own, and my daughter who was away at university.
I feel like I’ve already watched anything worth watching and would have cancelled my subscription already if it wasn’t for my family still using it.
I used to subscribe ALL of the streaming services (Netflix, HBO Max, tv+, Paramount+, Disney+, Hulu etc.) but cancelled all of them because it was getting too much choices on too shallow content. Now I rely on PBS (Passport that comes with my monthly donation), YouTube and Peacock (comes free with Xfinity wifi) and if I like a movie I could just rent it. This is working out well for me.
This is a US rollout of a restriction that they have already deployed in Latin America and Spain among other countries [1], that they restrict your account to a single household. So, no password sharing with friends.
I am honestly surprised they keep pushing this. In Spain, Netflix is among the most expensive options, and the most expensive if you consider the features you get (the 7,99 euro option just gives you HD, not full HD, and only one concurrent device); and the content quality has been going downhill and has lost a lot of staple shows. Most people I know that had Netflix just canceled their subscription once the deadline hit, because the price for extra members is ridiculous (basically a full subscription cost) and without password sharing it's not worth it compared to the other options.
I guess that the move didn't have as much effect as people thought it did, and that's why they're continuing the rollout.
> I guess that the move didn't have as much effect as people thought it did, and that's why they're continuing the rollout.
1 million people canceled their netflix accounts in Spain over the change. The new policy has already cost them several million dollars. That's a pretty major effect. Maybe they think people sharing passwords costs them more over time, or maybe they're just willing to hemorrhage users now hoping that they'll somehow win some back later under tighter restrictions, and at higher prices. It still seems like a gamble to me, considering they have a ton of competition with better libraries.
I think cracking down on the worst offenders (hundreds of people all over the globe using the same account) and keeping accounts to a reasonable number of simultaneous streams would have been a much better option.
I'm not surprised. One of the big problems that faces Netflix is market saturation. Lots of companies like Google or Facebook can grow profits by getting you to use their service more. The more you use, the more they earn. Netflix can only get more revenue by getting more paying users or raising prices on existing users.
In the United States and Canada, Netflix has 74.4M subscribers. The US has 124M households and Canada has 15M (139M total). 54% of US/Canadian households already subscribe to Netflix. If each of those paying subscriptions is also being used by a second non-paying household, that means that 100% of US/Canada has Netflix. If that's true, the only way for Netflix to gain revenue would be by raising prices or eliminating the account-sharing and hoping that more people will be paying customers.
I'm sure Netflix has run the numbers based on their internal data. They already know who is sharing accounts. If 50% of accounts are sharing, that means that the 74.4M subscribers becomes 111.8M households and 80% of US/Canada. Basically, Netflix should know how close to the total number of households already use Netflix (even if they aren't paying for it).
If 80% of households already have access, you've basically hit your growth limit. You can't expect 100% - only 87% of households have broadband internet in the US and some people just won't be interested. It seems reasonably likely that Netflix is pretty close to their growth limit in the US/Canada without going after account sharing. If 50% of accounts are sharing, they've probably hit 90-95% penetration in the US/Canada given that 13% of households don't have the internet required for Netflix.
I'm not surprised simply because it seems like the only avenue of growth for Netflix in many markets. Netflix doesn't charge you per show. They don't have add-on packages for sports or whatever. If you love your local take-out place, you might order from there more. If you love Facebook, you watch more of their ads. If you love Netflix, you don't buy a new account each day. To keep growing in many areas, Netflix needs to break up account sharing.
> To keep growing in many areas, Netflix needs to break up account sharing.
That trick only works once and then they're right back to where they were with zero growth because everyone already has a netflix account or they've been so pissed off at netflix changing the rules of their service and with price hikes, and the decline in content, that they've already canceled and moved on to the many many competitors with bigger/better libraries.
Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time. Their profits will increase as their costs go down and global population grows, as well as by moving into new markets.
That said, netflix still has some opportunities to make more money. They can sell their shows on physical media (I have season one of Stranger Things on DVD), and sell merch for their popular shows. Now that netflix is heavily invested in production they have even more opportunities to sell things to fans. Their challenge now is creating content that people want to spend money on, and not pissing off the customers they have.
> That trick only works once and then they're right back to where they were with zero growth
Yep, it just kicks the can down the road, but it might kick it ten years down the road.
One of Netflix's big problems is that they're really just HBO, but with more subscribers. As we're both talking about, they have some limits on their growth. At the same time, people have generally thought of them like a tech company.
> Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time.
The problem is that's extremely hard to actually do. People say this all the time, but often don't think about what it means. The problem is that if you're not trying to grow and change, usually someone comes along and pulls the rug out from under you. 1990s/early-2000s HBO could be described as happy with its premium-cable position and not needing to go for big growth. They would grow as the population grew. Except then Netflix decides to make a huge play: invest in tons of content and a big new streaming platform. Now Netflix starts taking over that space and taking a bigger share of the dollars being spent on video entertainment.
The problem is that customers aren't going to be loyal to a zero-growth, steady-profit company. Someone is going to come along and offer something that might be better - and if you aren't growing and investing, it's easy to get left behind. There's often a bear behind you and you need to keep running.
In fact, when Netflix launched its streaming service, it knew that it had to grow into a content producer and not simply a streaming service. Netflix could have said "we're so happy you love our streaming service, we'll just keep licensing whatever content we can for your subscription fees minus a cut for us." The company would have died. Licensing costs would go up, content producers would launch their own services like Disney+ and HBO Max, and customers that loved Netflix at the start would have left the service.
In fact, Netflix had to grow. Netflix had 7.5M subscribers when streaming started. 3 years later that was 20M. If Netflix didn't grow a lot more, they wouldn't be able to produce the amount of content that would keep customers around. 20M subscribers at $8/mo (the 2010 price and subscriber count) would be $1.9B in revenue per year. Netflix is spending $17B on content per year to keep their subscribers.
Maybe you argue that yes Netflix had to grow back then, but when you're Netflix's size now they could go zero-growth and allow sharing. But what happens when another company sees an opening to eat short-term losses building up a large content catalog on a non-sharing platform? Let's say I can get as much VC as I need and I build up an amazing catalog of content spending $40B per year on content and $8/mo service, but no account sharing on my service. I have way more and better new content than Netflix. I've seen the weakness in Netflix's business model (account sharing) and I've "solved" that issue by disallowing it from the start. Netflix subscribers start canceling (so they're now negative growth) and when my service feels established I can start raising prices to $10, $12, and $15 as time goes on and I've achieved 120M US/Canada subscribers instead of just 74M. Yes!
Zero-growth can certainly work for a while. At some point, it's hard because someone will attack that weakness and you'll end up with negative growth. Maybe what you were originally known for becomes just a feature. How many pieces of software have just become features of your OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked.... If Netflix hadn't pursued growth and invested heavily in content to fuel growth...
You can sidestep the "growth trap" if you can become a utility.
Disney+ could do that, they have a huge backlog of children's content and people will pay for "the digital babysitter". All they need to do is buy cocomelon and pinkfong and they'd rule the upcoming generation.
But if your content sucks, then a competitor can eat your lunch by having good content.
You can't afford to buy the most effective content either, if you don't push yourself into a strong position.
Even at Disney, it seems like the Disney Plus team is struggling to maintain the company-wide financial support it needs to grow large enough to be profitable.
So in which countries have they rolled out this policy so far? I remember enough from some prior announcement to know that the US is not the first or only such country, and that it's not yet worldwide, but I don't remember where else it's in place.
In Canada, I had the full pickle 4K account and my girls in another city used my account. When the new rules kicked in, I cut my plan and pay half now. And I'll cancel it this month. The service is just not worth it with all the crappy content.
This is the most mind-blowing aspect of this. Kids away at college use their parents' accounts for entertainment. Those kids graduate, then get their own accounts.
Netflix is shooting themselves in the foot. These kids will just adopt content from other providers.
With kids and parents, what may very well happen is that the parents start subsidizing kids' individual accounts while they're already in school. It's not like the few extra bucks a month is meaningful compared to the low 5 figure sum it takes to send a kid away to college.
> Those kids graduate, then get their own accounts.
Pretty sure those kids graduate and keep using their parents accounts (source: I graduated >10 years ago, still use my parents account). Unless they have kids of their own and need their own account.
Shared netflix has been a nice way for boomers and gen X to do something nice for their struggling kids. Really curious if Netflix will even make more money from this. Even if revenue doesn't change or decreases, they might also benefit by paying less in bandwidth per paying user.
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.
> 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
I really dislike how every corporate communication regarding an “update” now means “here’s how we’re making things worse for you.”
I know honesty has never really been the fundamental value of public relations initiatives, but it would be refreshing to occasionally see a company saying that they’re putting the squeeze on customers because they need to protect their margins or even just because they can. The formerly-neutral “update” is starting to rankle.
Corey Doctrow has a good term for this, or at least it’s him i heard say it: enshitification. I think it just captures the dynamics beautifully, it’s almost poetic.
Ah, yes. Cory Doctrow. One of those people everybody hoped was full of shit and/or irrelevant 20 years ago, who, sadly, turned out not only to be right, but completely relevant (c.f.https://StallmanWasRight.reddit.com)
That's a great word, but wouldn't just plain "shittification" be better?
I think it's better as "enshitification". Where "shitification" would probably be a noun (like "relocation"), "enshitification" then becomes a verb to carry out that process (like "endanger" to "danger").
Reading this one, though, this seems like a rare case where they're not trying to spin it as a positive for the customer.
They pretty much just state what they're doing, and even ack at the bottom that there are other options.
FWIW, I'm not (currently) a subscriber, and only subscribe seasonally as shows get released that I'm interested in (e.g. Stranger Things), which isn't often.
Somehow I find “clarifications” which rescind an obviously boneheaded move to be more annoying. At least the bad-update isn’t an attempt to totally gaslight us.
I don't see anything to dislike here. It is an update, and this particular notice is avoiding any of the usual nonsense like "to better serve our customers" or "to improve your experience".
It seems straightforward and to the point. And they're a for-profit corporation, of course they need to protect their profitability. That goes without saying. If they go out of business, then no Netflix programming for anybody, and no subscriber wants that or they wouldn't be subscribing in the first place.
Their stock went from $690 in Oct 2021 to $175 in June 2022.
That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
So of course this is a calculated bet to improve profitability. Virtually everything a for-profit corporation does is to improve profitability -- that's the whole point of being a business in the first place. What else would you expect?
No. It was specifically due to not meeting expected subscriber numbers, prompting a widespread negative reevaluation of Netflix's entire business model. The decrease was way beyond anything affecting the stock market or tech stocks generally. A simple glance at the numbers, and the dramatic plummets directly after earnings reports, makes that clear.
> It was specifically due to not meeting expected subscriber numbers
Sure, but "not meeting expected subscriber numbers" doesn't mean "the company is soon going to be unable to keep the lights on" or even "the company has an unsustainable business model and will fail". It just means market analysts believed Netflix would grow at a particular rate, but they grew at a lower rate. Wall Street is pretty fickle about growth numbers.
Also note that the stock price has partially recovered, to $355. A year of fairly steady stock price increase doesn't suggest to me that there's anything particularly wrong with the company.
Up higher, you said that a 75% price drop is "three quarters of the way to bankruptcy", which is... just not how the stock market works. The stock price is just a reflection of how the public market values ownership in the company. Hell, the stock price of a company going through bankruptcy proceedings might not even drop all the way to zero, depending on the details of the bankruptcy (e.g., if the company's assets exceed liabilities, there'd still be money left over for shareholders even in a liquidation). And regardless, bankruptcy doesn't even mean the company is going to be shut down; plenty of companies come out of chapter 11 and remain going concerns.
Share based comp is accounted under a different line item then OPEX. And if the share price falls, more shres are used. If share prices rise bove projections, share based comp can become an issue due to the guaranteed number of shares outstanding all of a sudden becoming really expensive...
Please don't be insulting by telling other people what to learn.
And if you look at the quarter before -- 2022Q4 -- they made just $55 million net income, which on revenue of 7.85B is below 1% profit.
The overall point is that Netflix is in an extremely volatile and risky industry where it's not in a position to leisurely "extract" more profit because it's a bad guy or something, but rather it's very much been forced into doing things like cracking down on password sharing and introducing an ad-supporter tier simply to stay healthy as a business. Fortunately both of those things seem to be going well, but they easily might not have.
If a company's market cap drops 75% in a short period of time, it's making big changes out of necessity, not as a comfortable choice.
I'm not trying to be insulting, I'm trying to help you and other readers. You're clearly ignorant of company finances, and commenting like you know what you're talking about is doing no one any favours.
You picked the one quarter they did poorly, before this they made a consistent 1B+ net profit. This is extremely good financials, and not volatile at all. They also have 50B in assets at the moment, including almost 8B in cash.
While your overall point and conclusion is correct, this paragraph is a bad characterization of the relationship between stock price and solvency, hence the replies:
>That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
Companies share price matters to shareholders and implies an ability to raise additional capital. It doesn’t have anything to do with solvency unless they borrowed money to buy back shares (which some companies did do when interest rates were low and share prices were depressed). Employees on stock incentive plans probably are eating the burden more than anyone.
Of course it does. If a stock goes to $0, the company is essentially insolvent. Sure there are details of timing -- insolvency isn't exactly the same as bankruptcy isn't exactly the same as a stock price of $0 -- but in practice they all tend to go together and the company as a going concern owned by present investors is effed.
I’m sorry, you’re just wrong. While share price generally correlated to the market investors view of future value there’s no direct relationship between equity valuation and corporate performance in any way whatsoever, other than the ability to raise additional capital. Once the equity has been sold in the primary issuance it’s only relationship to the corporation is an ownership claim and a weak claim on assets.
I literally said they're not exactly the same. But in practice, if the share price is $0, it's because the company is generally unable to pay its bills for long and bankruptcy is imminent. If the market thinks a company has zero value, the company is unlikely to survive for long, unless some miracle proves the market wrong.
Splitting hairs over these technicalities is important for lawyers and analysts and management and in bankruptcy court, but not terribly important in the larger view. In the larger view, market cap via share price is a very practical reflection of the overall health/viability of a publicly traded company.
See the parallel comment about Lehman. Share price was fine. Company wasn’t. Only once it was public the company was effectively dead did the shares fall. They are unrelated.
But it’s also not splitting hairs. It’s important to realize that equity price has no bearing on the company itself. You’re talking about something different than what was being discussed. You’re saying share price is correlated to expectation of company performance. What was being discussed was company performance is related to share price. One direction is true but the other isn’t. Companies see their valuations fall for all sorts of reasons that are not reflected in actual performance. Thats often because of a hype cycle that deflates, or maybe a scandal involving an executive, or whatever. This fall in valuation doesn’t impair the company in the least, except for if they need to raise capital by issuing equity.
May companies get delisted, which effectively brings their share price to the penny stock levels. They sometimes resurface and relist. Companies also can do certain corporate actions that make their stock basically worthless. The key is that while a stocks price sometimes corresponds to actual performance, actual performance is never impacted by stock price.
Stock markets are secondary markets. When you buy or sell Meta stock no money flows in or out of Meta. If Meta don't want to raise more capital, which they don't, ... their stock price means nothing to them until the shareholders revolt and vote for change (except they can't in Meta's case, since Zuck has total control).
There’s a technical detail here to note though. To management the share price actually does matter because they have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns, and the board even more so. So while it’s true equity has no bearing on current operations, current operations does have to consider share price.
Well, it does exist but it’s premise is twisted and unclear. Dodge v Ford established such a duty exists but over time (as discussed in the article you linked) it’s been interpreted as a duty to the long benefit of shareholders. Dodge v Ford hinges on the fact Ford stopped paying dividends to pay his workers and that it was an enrichment of the employees at the expense of the equity holder. That’s been twisted around but never fully dismissed or accepted. But you can see shareholder value lawsuits all the time. However it’s a common law civil duty, not like a financial manager fiduciary responsibility that can bear criminal teeth.
The share price reflected the company’s state, but the share price didn’t induce the companies state. Debt and obligations were what brought down Lehman, not the stock price. (Well, not directly - if the stock had been worth a lot they could have raised capital… but just like their credit spreads blowing out, their stock price drop made capital raising impossible)
While it's true that there is no direct link between share price and solvency, share price is the market's valuation of the company. This is very much impacted by the (future) profitability and the solvency of the company.
If the market thinks the company won't be able to make a lot of profit, or the market thinks the company is approaching insolvency, the share price will tank.
In other words, falling share price is not a cause of insolvency, it can be an indicator for it. The share price quite literally is the market value of the company.
This sort of misunderstanding is what we should expect when we teach people that the stock market is equal to the economy, rather than teaching people that it's just a casino for the ultra-wealthy.
Not only is stock price not a cause of bankruptcy (as others have said)... but you're comparing meme stock, overcharged markets frenzy with everyone's wallet plump from the stimulus, with the beginning of a recession.
(Side note, recaptcha is getting genuinely awful. 3 different challenges, 1 of which had 3 steps, and 20 seconds to get past it?! Have they given up detecting bots and decided to just make them wait?!)
I agree. The e-mail is unusually, refreshingly clear for typical corporate communication.
That said, the image at the top of the article is... menacing. I know it's sticking to Netflix branding, but the smiling, deeply red screens, made me feel like that house is about to murder everyone inside.
Holy shit you weren't kidding about that image. I was expected a red house with red TVs in it with a white background in a pleasant "Google-y"/ 'kawaii corporate-memphis' style.
It is decidedly dark / menacing / imposing / threatening, not playful at all.
What else should they say about their enshittification?
The idea that many updates are now hostile is a disturbing but real hallmark of the cloudified age, in particular. Users used to have more choice, to have the power to decide to update.
Now they cannot manage the software; that than being a user, they are now merely a client.
Moreover I don’t see how this is really an update on anything, they’re not saying “this is how it was done and how it will be done now”, they’re just stating things as matter of fact, which makes it difficult to know exactly what they’re changing.
I received an e-mail update several weeks ago from a company that actually improved and made things cheaper in every way.
I had to read it 5 times to be sure that there was absolutely nothing being cut/made worse because they used the same corporate speak as one usually does for bad news (i.e. there was no "GOOD NEWS YOU NOW PAY $10 LESS", you had to dig through the details...).
This, however, was a major supermarket chain that's been going for nearly 100 years. They decided to make delivery cheaper AND reduce minimum spend per delivery by half. There must have been something they made more expensive somewhere to compensate or maybe they were pushed to do this by the market, I am not sure.
> There must have been something they made more expensive somewhere to compensate
Milk and eggs? Probably they saw a dip in spending because people can't afford extras. Cheaper delivery can get people to add-spend "cause I'm already paying for delivery, should make it worth it".
There was an internal joke / meme at Google that any announcement starting with "An update on X" == we are killing X, to the point that if someone was sending their resignation email the subject line of the email would be "An update on <name>"
My current favorite corp speak is “we can’t wait to share it with you”. Seems like it’s in literally every product announcement. At least this one is positive
I do not see anything dishonest here. No lies, no broken promises. If anything it is a bit passive-aggressive, but essentially the message is: “many of you are breaking terms or service and we are going to le you know we know who you are, as a warning”.
Ahoy there, mateys! I be here to say that I be leaving Netflix. They be raising their prices too high, and they be taking away all the good shows. I be sailin' the high seas for my entertainment now. Arrrr!
Why be coy and simply (heavily) imply pirating? Just say outright that you're going to pirate stuff because you for some reason believe you have a right to view their content and not pay for it?
Pirating is seizing a ship for material goods. People get hurt or killed when this happens. And the economics of material goods are literally otherworldly from those of digital goods. (You can't download a car -- copying a car for practically free.)
Torrenting is just choosing the most convenient distribution mechanism for data that you own. You can buy DRM-free music, but not DRM-free shows or movies unless they're bound to physical media. The reasons why have to do with backdoor meetings and lobbying by the MPAA, and I don't care much about them. And Netflix expects me to own nothing and be happy while leasing tenuous network access to compressed streams of content by paying indefinitely. Cute.
I think it's funny they got us to implicitly condemn solving their greed-based distribution problem with a term as hyperbolic as "pirating" though. They want to remain in meatspace, where the old economic model makes sense -- scarcity, wear and tear, manufacturing costs per unit, so they try pretending we're all still there in cyberspace by guilt tripping us with meatspace vocabulary.
There's a lot to unpack in what you wrote, and I agree with a lot of it. But you seem to be implying that the fact that you can't buy DRM-free shows or movies via your preferred distribution method (ie. without physical media) morally justifies illegally downloading stuff you haven't paid for (Netflix shows -- which as you noted you're not paying-to-own if you have a subscription). I can't agree with that, and I can't see how that makes any sense. Why do you think you have a right to obtain Netflix's content any way you please?
Also: "Piracy" might be a bad term for the act of uploading and downloading something for which you do not have the rights to do so since it is indeed different than physical piracy, but "torrenting" is not an improvement, since torrenting _can_ be completely legal, depending on what content is being uploaded and downloaded. I think it's useful to have a term that specifically refers to the illegal act. I haven't heard of a good popular term for this yet, so I'm OK with using "piracy".
Thanks for paying for the content that I can access for free, I'm sure Netflix shareholders thank you for your service. Netflix is effectively doing a massive price hike with no corresponding value given.
You sound pretty proud of the fact that you're pirating what other people are paying for, so again I ask, why use veiled references to what you're suggesting?
It's a mildly more humorous comment - also LLMs made it easy to piratify my comment. It's just some low effort internet humor - take it easy.
Also for all the injustice in this world, you getting so offended on Netflix's behalf regarding this is kinda mindblowing, you must be giga privileged.
I'm _not_ upset on Netflix's behalf. I have many friends who work in tv/movie production. So when I see people like you proudly talking about pirating tv and/or movies I'm offended on my friends' behalf (behalves?) because you're negatively impacting my friends. You might think you're just screwing over netflix, but you're not. You're screwing over a lot of people.
My daughters have been freeloading on our Netflix even though WE TOLD THEM NOT TO DO THAT. So now they'll get booted off without us having to be the bad parents texting them that we want to use it now. No complaints from me.
The idea of Netflix executives helping your parenting by letting you avoid the terrifying possibility of...saying no to your children...is hilarious to me.
I'm really curious what management/accounting at Netflix estimated free-riding costs the company every year and what the savings will be for the second half of this year by pruning.
There should definitely be like 1 or 2 days a month where accounts get a free exemption. So people who bring their rarely used tablet with them traveling aren't screwed.
It's kind of strange how Netflix has the gall to raise prices while they are objectively the worst original content platform out there (last show I watched was Squid Games almost 2 years ago). Will gladly cancel my Netflix sub and keep Hulu (huge back catalog), HBO (House of the Dragon, The Last of Us), and AppleTV (Ted Lasso, For all Mankind, Severance).
password sharers and possibly anyone at all who travels or regularly watches netflix on multiple devices or from multiple locations. How annoying they make this will determine how long I keep paying them.
Anyone have a writeup on using TailScale to bypass these sorts of limits?
Some folks have said it includes SSID as a check which is definitely a wrinkle. I would have assumed it was mostly just using IP address.
This is one of those cases where the War Against General Purpose Computing is going to own society, score points against users. I assume if you can root & run Magisk you could fake a geolocation for example. But Google & Apple have done everything in their power to make rooted/jailbroken devices practically unusable, to build attestation frameworks & SafetyNet & other systems to make sure corporate payloads run safe from user-agency on devices. What a shitty future!
Basically you have a machine running at home, and when you want to watch Netflix, you send the traffic through that machine so it looks to Netflix like you're from your home network
We are back to the cable days. We know the likely outcome for this: increase in piracy. I do not advocate for this (not even a Netflix user myself) but they have forgotten about one of the motivations that allowed the streaming business to flourish, "cable cutting" for minimizing costs.
I am really curious about how the engineering team took on the challenge of identifying and tracking households within the constraints defined by Apple related to tracking users
They define any type of sharing as "Account Fraud and abuse of Terms of Service"
<-- However, some restrictions are in place, such as the number of active devices, the number of streams, and the number of downloaded titles. Many users across many platforms make for a uniquely large attack surface that includes content fraud, account fraud, and abuse of terms of service. Detection of fraud and abuse at scale and in real-time is highly challenging. -->
Does their US pricing model still couple streaming quality to the number of concurrent streams? It drives me batty that I can't get a "4k, but only one stream" plan.
Between that and the "is the thing I really want to watch available or not?" queue lottery, I got fed up a few years ago and ditched them completely. The general streaming experience has become so awful that I'll just go to Youtube or Amazon and pay $4 to get precisely what I want for 48 hours, instead of googling to figure out who the hell currently has 'Heat' or whatever on their streaming platform.
It's amazing, we've looped around to 1999. You have to surf around to see where and if what you want is even available - people even make aggregate guides to tell you what's on where (a TV Guide, if you will). A decent amount of the time, depending on your tastes, the thing you want probably isn't available on a platform you're currently paying for.
Tragically, though, you don't get the irreplaceable experience of talking in person with a full-bore, unfiltered Video Store Guy.
Even if I could purchase it I wouldn't. Haven't watched anything on Netflix in 3 or 4 months even with a sharing membership. Youtube Premium is where I spend most of my time, and get the most out of.
Without sharing its pretty hard to justify, every now and then there is a show that is a decent watch but then it's an eternity until the next season. I feeling a meta service that tracks your favorite shows and automatically subscribes/unsubscribes when they're new eps.
Glad they're actually pushing this. The fact that people think it's somehow their right to use stuff for free, that others had to put in work for, is mindblowing for me.
It would be more understandable if their founding CEO wasn't on record saying that they were happy to have people share their accounts, especially with their kids.
> The fact that people think it's somehow their right to use stuff for free, that others had to put in work for, is mindblowing for me.
People aren't pissed because they can't "use stuff for free" anymore. You can already pirate every show that's on netflix. People are upset because they were sold one thing, and now will not be getting what they paid for. I paid for x number of simultaneous devices/streams. I paid for a service which told me sharing passwords was perfectly fine. That's what I signed up for.
Now netflix changes the rules, which after multiple price increases, a library that has declined in quantity and quality, and an interface that is still terrible and increasingly stuffed with ads there is nothing mindblowing about the hate they're getting. They absolutely deserve to lose customers.
I really hate them for this move for them being fuckin hypocrites.
In theory it would be ok to have such a rule. But for years they have used the sharing of account as a marketing trick to get new users.
Imagine that they have 3 offers, with the most expensive one not far from 2x times the entry level price.
The main difference was the ability to have 2 or 4 person's watching at the same time.
Normally you would not have a real need for taking more than basic plans, but they pushed people to take the highest plan and share.
Now that they reached a peak in term of users, they switch their speech and pretend that they have to do a change because people are abusing of something that was not allowed to them in the first place.
So they need to get a good lesson with mass cancellation and downsizing subscriptions.
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[ 7.5 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadThe amount of entertainment I and the three people I share with get out of Netflix isn't worth the 4x cost increase. Maybe the other guys will get accounts, I don't know. I'm sure for some people it's worth it.
But as more people say that and don't bother watching until there's a whole finished story, then even more shows get canceled earlier because nobody watched the first season.
Aggressively launching lots of shows and canceling the lower performing ones might be a sound financial strategy in the short term, but I don't think it's doing great things for customer goodwill.
That's still netflix's fault. They need to stop expecting the world to flock to their newest shows the moment they are released, there's too much competing for our attention, and instead invest in stories and creators they believe in, and make sure that they're always funding and releasing a complete and quality product. It doesn't matter if a show is only one season, so long as that one season has a satisfying conclusion.
Stories written to span multiple seasons are fine too, but they need to commit to seeing that show to its conclusion. Even if a show doesn't perform very well, some percentage of Netflix subscribers will enjoy it making it an asset for their library and on a long enough timescale it'll be worth it, but if they really want to cancel a show before the story has a chance to reasonably end, they'd be better off removing it entirely from their library. Right now their library is filled with shows that will entice new watchers only to piss them off when they learn the plug was pulled early, or which will sit unwatched by the people who have already heard that netflix screwed the show and its fans over and that's a liability.
The only streaming I'm paying for now is dropout.tv, the little niche service descended from College Humor that only has like 3 shows producing new seasons. But it's consistently great, I'm not worried they're going to cancel after every season, and I'm supporting a small group of creators who all seem like nice people. Win-win-win.
It's not on customers to respect the corporation's whims. Customers vote with their wallets.
If two of them get an account, or you change your mind later, it's a huge win for Netflix.
Netflix has done the math and already tested this policy in several countries. They would never be rolling this out in their home market of the US if they weren't extremely confident that new subscriptions will outweigh cancellations.
Not 100%; with less viewers there will be less word of mouth about Netflix shows. Maybe that will be offset by paying less to license third party stuff with less viewers though.
Out of that 1 million, I think only ~300 000 were paying customers, but still it did not achieve the desired effect.
Source: https://www.today.com/popculture/netflix-guide-password-shar...
But if that’s really the case you can just use the same SSID on both places, and maybe use the same IP address space and router MAC. If they’re fingerprinting the home network that should do pretty good?
First, they should already know who has been sharing accounts. You haven't been having other households VPN to your local network for the past 5 years for Netflix. That gives them a great starting point.
They can look at SSIDs and not just your SSID, but all the SSIDs that your device is seeing. Even within a household, not all the SSIDs will be the same from room to room. For most people, there will be some overlap. Sure, maybe you live in a rural area and you're the only SSID around. For most people, it'll be hard to fake this.
Even if you make all the SSIDs look similar, have you dealt with your BSSIDs? BSSIDs can be used to geolocate most people pretty well. Almost no one has opted out of the big WiFi geolocation databases (or even knows they can).
Maybe you could have them VPN into your local network, but they could still use WiFi and other information to see that the connection is actually in a different location. Plus, as I noted, they should already know who has been connecting from multiple locations for years.
Maybe we all should change our SSIDs to "FBI Surveillance Van#1".
But if you're using a device that's always 4+ hours drive away, I think it's fair game for Netflix to look at that with suspicion.
Also, Netflix could look at viewing habits from different devices. If you watch something from a device at home, and then watch the next episode of that show at work, that's a good indicator that you're the same person using two different devices.
I guess I should have just kept it at 1 device and not tried to pay for my friend's usage.
For example, Netflix can easily notice that a TV is connecting from AT&T Fiber with one IP and another TV is connecting from Spectrum with a different IP. Many times they're watching at the same time so it's not someone on vacation.
It's relatively easy to note mobile devices like iPhones/Android and they have device IDs. Maybe you could hook your phone up to your TV, but most people aren't going to want to do that to save $8/mo (and walk up to their phone connected to the TV to select a new show or pause it). If the phone is on a WiFi connection (rather than cellular), Netflix can easily see that it's not the same household. People aren't likely to want to pay for a cellular plan (at $25+ per month) to avoid an $8 charge from Netflix.
If you're looking to catch 99% of people and you don't need it to be real-time, this should be pretty easy. Maybe some people will set up home VPNs, but that's going to be a small number of people. Even then, Android devices will give access to WiFi SSIDs in the area and even iOS has a permission to scan for Bluetooth devices which can be used for some amount of locating.
I guess the flip side of your question would be: how would you make it seem like you were connecting from the same household? You'd probably want all devices to be connecting from the same IP address. You'd probably want all devices connecting to the same SSID - and have neighboring SSIDs be the same. You wouldn't want them to see "they're both connecting to XYZ and have the same IP address, but they're each seeing a dozen additional SSIDs and zero overlap - what are the odds of that?" You can control your own SSID, but not all your neighbors' SSIDs.
I don't think Netflix is looking for something foolproof. I'm guessing they're looking for something that will find most instances of sharing while still being cautious enough that they don't bother people who aren't sharing. Even if your IP address is dynamic or CG-NAT, it'll still be the same for all your devices at a given time. Most people have internet from a handful of companies and it isn't that hard to figure out how those ISPs are handling things and accommodate it.
In fact, Netflix doesn't really need to do this blindly. They have logs from years of our usage. They have probably already detected who is using it in multiple locations and that makes it easy to put a flag on the account for the future. This account has been used in multiple locations for the past 3 years, if something looks suspicious, throw up the validation challenge. On other accounts without such a history, they could be more cautious. Netflix probably isn't worried about one month of sharing compared to the ongoing decade-long sharing that they believe is eating into their revenue. They can bide their time.
Are those IDs separate from the advertising IDs that users can constantly change?
Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.
I feel like Netflix is seasonal. Just like Disney+ and HBO.
Come fall Netflix will debut a bunch of viral bangers, and by February you'll be questioning if Netflix is worth it again.
Barring returning to piracy, I think I'd still have cancelled but sometimes subscribed for a month on the rare occasion something like The Queen's Gambit (2020) came out then cancel for a few years again.
HBO has some all-time classics that will be watched and discussed for decades, not just months. Sopranos is still discussed and rewatched and memed. Same with The Wire.
I feel that Netflix's offerings are hot for a few months, then fade from public memory.
All I know is that with the fracturing of the streaming landscape, where everything requires a separate $8.99/$11.99/$15.99 (or whatever) monthly fee, downloading Linux ISOs starts to look more and more attractive.
Is that a veiled reference to piracy? If so, why not just say piracy?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Linux+ISO&am...
Apple TV is $6.99 a month. Netflix looks to be $9.99 (ignoring the ad-subsidized offering which isn’t really comparable). It is kind of hard to share an Apple TV login (at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to share it without also sharing my whole Apple account), so I guess that extra $3 must be the price of all the sharing going on.
Although, Apple TV seems to have much better in-house shows, so who knows?
It doesn’t even get you 1080p (for that you need the $15.49 “standard” plan, and 4k comes on the $20 a month plan)
Maybe a bit off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone else actively avoids 4k? I hate watching content in ultra high resolution. It looks strange and unreal to me (Yes: I've turned off "soap opera mode")
I'm really glad netflix makes it easy to avoid higher resolution versions of their shows =/
Yes there is. For one, 90% of non-native 4K is absolute crap. Upscales tend to bludgeon detail even compared to 480p/i sources, and DNR is rather crap, especially on the intense settings companies typically use.
Native 4k can be better, but there’s still so many mastering options that it still causes problems. See Star Wars, LotR, Terminator 2 as all rather controversial 4K releases.
Low resolution video doesn't bother me at all. I can happily watch 480p. But the weird compression artifacts following moving objects absolutely frustrate and distract me.
Maybe streaming services aren't encoding their higher resolution streams with a sufficient bitrate? Or maybe the higher resolution makes the artifacts more noticeable? Either way, the low resolution experience seems consistently superior.
> "There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K. Your eyes aren't somehow low resolution with 1080p closer to that realism."
This is definitely not the case and one of the big reasons is lossy compression. Precision without accuracy can be very noticeable, in terms of artifacting.
Yeah, I fell into the "do the right thing, it will be better" trap.
The modern solution is to sign up for a service, binge watch everything on it, and then cancel. But I don't really binge watch, and we have enough people in the house with different tastes it doesn't really work that well.
What really killed me is I pay for PBS Passport. But there are some shows with different licenses (I guess) that are only available on other services.
You do it by setting up family sharing. But yeah it's super integrated, you'll be sharing a lot more than just Apple TV+ if you just set it naively.
If the goal is to just share TV+, then maybe a solution could be to create a separate Apple ID just for that, but actually using it will be difficult for Apple users.
My guess is this is Apples probably very successful way of disincentivising "account sharing" (as in, swapping access for your friends Hulu, Netfilx, etc, while enabling actual account sharing within a family)
I suspect you're right about this. This change has no effect on the people who aren't sharing their account, so those people have very little incentive to comment except perhaps out of sympathy for those who it will affect. So most of the uproar will understandably be negative, even if a majority of users do not share their account.
These services only have new good content like 50% of the time. So it makes more sense to cycle subscriptions on and off. This is harder if you’ve given someone your password (I’d definitely not be subscribed to Disney+ right now if my sibling wasn’t using it).
I feel like I’ve already watched anything worth watching and would have cancelled my subscription already if it wasn’t for my family still using it.
- Higher prices
- Fewer features (rip DVDs)
- Even higher prices once you consider also subscribing to competitors
- Pay us for what used to be free!
I am honestly surprised they keep pushing this. In Spain, Netflix is among the most expensive options, and the most expensive if you consider the features you get (the 7,99 euro option just gives you HD, not full HD, and only one concurrent device); and the content quality has been going downhill and has lost a lot of staple shows. Most people I know that had Netflix just canceled their subscription once the deadline hit, because the price for extra members is ridiculous (basically a full subscription cost) and without password sharing it's not worth it compared to the other options.
I guess that the move didn't have as much effect as people thought it did, and that's why they're continuing the rollout.
1: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/update-on-sharing-may-us
1 million people canceled their netflix accounts in Spain over the change. The new policy has already cost them several million dollars. That's a pretty major effect. Maybe they think people sharing passwords costs them more over time, or maybe they're just willing to hemorrhage users now hoping that they'll somehow win some back later under tighter restrictions, and at higher prices. It still seems like a gamble to me, considering they have a ton of competition with better libraries.
I think cracking down on the worst offenders (hundreds of people all over the globe using the same account) and keeping accounts to a reasonable number of simultaneous streams would have been a much better option.
I'm not surprised. One of the big problems that faces Netflix is market saturation. Lots of companies like Google or Facebook can grow profits by getting you to use their service more. The more you use, the more they earn. Netflix can only get more revenue by getting more paying users or raising prices on existing users.
In the United States and Canada, Netflix has 74.4M subscribers. The US has 124M households and Canada has 15M (139M total). 54% of US/Canadian households already subscribe to Netflix. If each of those paying subscriptions is also being used by a second non-paying household, that means that 100% of US/Canada has Netflix. If that's true, the only way for Netflix to gain revenue would be by raising prices or eliminating the account-sharing and hoping that more people will be paying customers.
I'm sure Netflix has run the numbers based on their internal data. They already know who is sharing accounts. If 50% of accounts are sharing, that means that the 74.4M subscribers becomes 111.8M households and 80% of US/Canada. Basically, Netflix should know how close to the total number of households already use Netflix (even if they aren't paying for it).
If 80% of households already have access, you've basically hit your growth limit. You can't expect 100% - only 87% of households have broadband internet in the US and some people just won't be interested. It seems reasonably likely that Netflix is pretty close to their growth limit in the US/Canada without going after account sharing. If 50% of accounts are sharing, they've probably hit 90-95% penetration in the US/Canada given that 13% of households don't have the internet required for Netflix.
I'm not surprised simply because it seems like the only avenue of growth for Netflix in many markets. Netflix doesn't charge you per show. They don't have add-on packages for sports or whatever. If you love your local take-out place, you might order from there more. If you love Facebook, you watch more of their ads. If you love Netflix, you don't buy a new account each day. To keep growing in many areas, Netflix needs to break up account sharing.
That trick only works once and then they're right back to where they were with zero growth because everyone already has a netflix account or they've been so pissed off at netflix changing the rules of their service and with price hikes, and the decline in content, that they've already canceled and moved on to the many many competitors with bigger/better libraries.
Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time. Their profits will increase as their costs go down and global population grows, as well as by moving into new markets.
That said, netflix still has some opportunities to make more money. They can sell their shows on physical media (I have season one of Stranger Things on DVD), and sell merch for their popular shows. Now that netflix is heavily invested in production they have even more opportunities to sell things to fans. Their challenge now is creating content that people want to spend money on, and not pissing off the customers they have.
Yep, it just kicks the can down the road, but it might kick it ten years down the road.
One of Netflix's big problems is that they're really just HBO, but with more subscribers. As we're both talking about, they have some limits on their growth. At the same time, people have generally thought of them like a tech company.
> Netflix (and most companies really) shouldn't expect or aim for endless growth. They should just strive to make a healthy profit and sustain that over time.
The problem is that's extremely hard to actually do. People say this all the time, but often don't think about what it means. The problem is that if you're not trying to grow and change, usually someone comes along and pulls the rug out from under you. 1990s/early-2000s HBO could be described as happy with its premium-cable position and not needing to go for big growth. They would grow as the population grew. Except then Netflix decides to make a huge play: invest in tons of content and a big new streaming platform. Now Netflix starts taking over that space and taking a bigger share of the dollars being spent on video entertainment.
The problem is that customers aren't going to be loyal to a zero-growth, steady-profit company. Someone is going to come along and offer something that might be better - and if you aren't growing and investing, it's easy to get left behind. There's often a bear behind you and you need to keep running.
In fact, when Netflix launched its streaming service, it knew that it had to grow into a content producer and not simply a streaming service. Netflix could have said "we're so happy you love our streaming service, we'll just keep licensing whatever content we can for your subscription fees minus a cut for us." The company would have died. Licensing costs would go up, content producers would launch their own services like Disney+ and HBO Max, and customers that loved Netflix at the start would have left the service.
In fact, Netflix had to grow. Netflix had 7.5M subscribers when streaming started. 3 years later that was 20M. If Netflix didn't grow a lot more, they wouldn't be able to produce the amount of content that would keep customers around. 20M subscribers at $8/mo (the 2010 price and subscriber count) would be $1.9B in revenue per year. Netflix is spending $17B on content per year to keep their subscribers.
Maybe you argue that yes Netflix had to grow back then, but when you're Netflix's size now they could go zero-growth and allow sharing. But what happens when another company sees an opening to eat short-term losses building up a large content catalog on a non-sharing platform? Let's say I can get as much VC as I need and I build up an amazing catalog of content spending $40B per year on content and $8/mo service, but no account sharing on my service. I have way more and better new content than Netflix. I've seen the weakness in Netflix's business model (account sharing) and I've "solved" that issue by disallowing it from the start. Netflix subscribers start canceling (so they're now negative growth) and when my service feels established I can start raising prices to $10, $12, and $15 as time goes on and I've achieved 120M US/Canada subscribers instead of just 74M. Yes!
Zero-growth can certainly work for a while. At some point, it's hard because someone will attack that weakness and you'll end up with negative growth. Maybe what you were originally known for becomes just a feature. How many pieces of software have just become features of your OS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked.... If Netflix hadn't pursued growth and invested heavily in content to fuel growth...
Disney+ could do that, they have a huge backlog of children's content and people will pay for "the digital babysitter". All they need to do is buy cocomelon and pinkfong and they'd rule the upcoming generation.
But if your content sucks, then a competitor can eat your lunch by having good content.
Even at Disney, it seems like the Disney Plus team is struggling to maintain the company-wide financial support it needs to grow large enough to be profitable.
Netflix is shooting themselves in the foot. These kids will just adopt content from other providers.
Pretty sure those kids graduate and keep using their parents accounts (source: I graduated >10 years ago, still use my parents account). Unless they have kids of their own and need their own account.
But most gen Z and millennials are pretty broke (half living paycheck to paycheck: https://fortune.com/2023/05/19/quiet-quitting-side-hustle-se... -> https://archive.is/u415s ), so many wouldn't be able to pay for netflix on their own
Shared netflix has been a nice way for boomers and gen X to do something nice for their struggling kids. Really curious if Netflix will even make more money from this. Even if revenue doesn't change or decreases, they might also benefit by paying less in bandwidth per paying user.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know honesty has never really been the fundamental value of public relations initiatives, but it would be refreshing to occasionally see a company saying that they’re putting the squeeze on customers because they need to protect their margins or even just because they can. The formerly-neutral “update” is starting to rankle.
FTFY.
The root word is "shitty". Double T.
I've seen this a couple of times now without the double T, and it pains me.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
That's a great word, but wouldn't just plain "shittification" be better?
Also, a free tailscale account might be a good solution to the household restrictions
They pretty much just state what they're doing, and even ack at the bottom that there are other options.
FWIW, I'm not (currently) a subscriber, and only subscribe seasonally as shows get released that I'm interested in (e.g. Stranger Things), which isn't often.
It seems straightforward and to the point. And they're a for-profit corporation, of course they need to protect their profitability. That goes without saying. If they go out of business, then no Netflix programming for anybody, and no subscriber wants that or they wouldn't be subscribing in the first place.
That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
So of course this is a calculated bet to improve profitability. Virtually everything a for-profit corporation does is to improve profitability -- that's the whole point of being a business in the first place. What else would you expect?
I'd speculate that those expected subscriber numbers may have been inflated by the covid pandemic.
So while Covid might have been part of it, it's nowhere near the full story.
Counterpoint: Gamestop.
Counterpoint: Bitcoin.
Counterpoint: AMC.
Counterpoint: literally any of its other fellow meme stonks
Sure, but "not meeting expected subscriber numbers" doesn't mean "the company is soon going to be unable to keep the lights on" or even "the company has an unsustainable business model and will fail". It just means market analysts believed Netflix would grow at a particular rate, but they grew at a lower rate. Wall Street is pretty fickle about growth numbers.
Also note that the stock price has partially recovered, to $355. A year of fairly steady stock price increase doesn't suggest to me that there's anything particularly wrong with the company.
Up higher, you said that a 75% price drop is "three quarters of the way to bankruptcy", which is... just not how the stock market works. The stock price is just a reflection of how the public market values ownership in the company. Hell, the stock price of a company going through bankruptcy proceedings might not even drop all the way to zero, depending on the details of the bankruptcy (e.g., if the company's assets exceed liabilities, there'd still be money left over for shareholders even in a liquidation). And regardless, bankruptcy doesn't even mean the company is going to be shut down; plenty of companies come out of chapter 11 and remain going concerns.
Is it though? Were they funding operations by selling shares?
Your analysis makes no sense. Please learn more about finances before commenting on financial matters.
And if you look at the quarter before -- 2022Q4 -- they made just $55 million net income, which on revenue of 7.85B is below 1% profit.
The overall point is that Netflix is in an extremely volatile and risky industry where it's not in a position to leisurely "extract" more profit because it's a bad guy or something, but rather it's very much been forced into doing things like cracking down on password sharing and introducing an ad-supporter tier simply to stay healthy as a business. Fortunately both of those things seem to be going well, but they easily might not have.
If a company's market cap drops 75% in a short period of time, it's making big changes out of necessity, not as a comfortable choice.
— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
You picked the one quarter they did poorly, before this they made a consistent 1B+ net profit. This is extremely good financials, and not volatile at all. They also have 50B in assets at the moment, including almost 8B in cash.
>That's a 75% plummet, which is definitely approaching the equivalent of struggling-to-keep-the-lights-on for a modern corporation. That's three quarters of the way to bankruptcy, big red flashing danger lights.
Of course it does. If a stock goes to $0, the company is essentially insolvent. Sure there are details of timing -- insolvency isn't exactly the same as bankruptcy isn't exactly the same as a stock price of $0 -- but in practice they all tend to go together and the company as a going concern owned by present investors is effed.
Splitting hairs over these technicalities is important for lawyers and analysts and management and in bankruptcy court, but not terribly important in the larger view. In the larger view, market cap via share price is a very practical reflection of the overall health/viability of a publicly traded company.
But it’s also not splitting hairs. It’s important to realize that equity price has no bearing on the company itself. You’re talking about something different than what was being discussed. You’re saying share price is correlated to expectation of company performance. What was being discussed was company performance is related to share price. One direction is true but the other isn’t. Companies see their valuations fall for all sorts of reasons that are not reflected in actual performance. Thats often because of a hype cycle that deflates, or maybe a scandal involving an executive, or whatever. This fall in valuation doesn’t impair the company in the least, except for if they need to raise capital by issuing equity.
May companies get delisted, which effectively brings their share price to the penny stock levels. They sometimes resurface and relist. Companies also can do certain corporate actions that make their stock basically worthless. The key is that while a stocks price sometimes corresponds to actual performance, actual performance is never impacted by stock price.
If the market thinks the company won't be able to make a lot of profit, or the market thinks the company is approaching insolvency, the share price will tank.
In other words, falling share price is not a cause of insolvency, it can be an indicator for it. The share price quite literally is the market value of the company.
See how picking arbitrary dates different from yours makes it look like a completely different story?
(Side note, recaptcha is getting genuinely awful. 3 different challenges, 1 of which had 3 steps, and 20 seconds to get past it?! Have they given up detecting bots and decided to just make them wait?!)
That said, the image at the top of the article is... menacing. I know it's sticking to Netflix branding, but the smiling, deeply red screens, made me feel like that house is about to murder everyone inside.
[0]: https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/123456789/16372...
It is decidedly dark / menacing / imposing / threatening, not playful at all.
The image at the top of the mail is also a bit creepy
The idea that many updates are now hostile is a disturbing but real hallmark of the cloudified age, in particular. Users used to have more choice, to have the power to decide to update.
Now they cannot manage the software; that than being a user, they are now merely a client.
I had to read it 5 times to be sure that there was absolutely nothing being cut/made worse because they used the same corporate speak as one usually does for bad news (i.e. there was no "GOOD NEWS YOU NOW PAY $10 LESS", you had to dig through the details...).
>Company starts
>Makes things better to get a larger market share
>Gets a mini-monopoly (large enough share that inertia and name recognition can preserve its market share)
>Slowly but deliberately gets worse to increase profit margins
This, however, was a major supermarket chain that's been going for nearly 100 years. They decided to make delivery cheaper AND reduce minimum spend per delivery by half. There must have been something they made more expensive somewhere to compensate or maybe they were pushed to do this by the market, I am not sure.
Milk and eggs? Probably they saw a dip in spending because people can't afford extras. Cheaper delivery can get people to add-spend "cause I'm already paying for delivery, should make it worth it".
- https://blog.chromium.org/2023/05/an-update-on-lock-icon.htm...
- https://blogger.googleblog.com/2019/01/an-update-on-google-a...
- https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2015/06/an-update-...
The rest: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22an+update+on%22+site%3Ago...
“An update on sharing: it’s bad now”
...
as to the title, maybe "on sharing" would be better.
I also remember Steve Jobs' memo on adobe flash. He titled it "Thoughts on Flash"¹
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
Torrenting is just choosing the most convenient distribution mechanism for data that you own. You can buy DRM-free music, but not DRM-free shows or movies unless they're bound to physical media. The reasons why have to do with backdoor meetings and lobbying by the MPAA, and I don't care much about them. And Netflix expects me to own nothing and be happy while leasing tenuous network access to compressed streams of content by paying indefinitely. Cute.
I think it's funny they got us to implicitly condemn solving their greed-based distribution problem with a term as hyperbolic as "pirating" though. They want to remain in meatspace, where the old economic model makes sense -- scarcity, wear and tear, manufacturing costs per unit, so they try pretending we're all still there in cyberspace by guilt tripping us with meatspace vocabulary.
Also: "Piracy" might be a bad term for the act of uploading and downloading something for which you do not have the rights to do so since it is indeed different than physical piracy, but "torrenting" is not an improvement, since torrenting _can_ be completely legal, depending on what content is being uploaded and downloaded. I think it's useful to have a term that specifically refers to the illegal act. I haven't heard of a good popular term for this yet, so I'm OK with using "piracy".
Explaining a painfully obvious joke destroys the joke, even when it was painfully obvious in the first place.
Also for all the injustice in this world, you getting so offended on Netflix's behalf regarding this is kinda mindblowing, you must be giga privileged.
Some folks have said it includes SSID as a check which is definitely a wrinkle. I would have assumed it was mostly just using IP address.
This is one of those cases where the War Against General Purpose Computing is going to own society, score points against users. I assume if you can root & run Magisk you could fake a geolocation for example. But Google & Apple have done everything in their power to make rooted/jailbroken devices practically unusable, to build attestation frameworks & SafetyNet & other systems to make sure corporate payloads run safe from user-agency on devices. What a shitty future!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CunwUs08og
https://netflixtechblog.com/machine-learning-for-fraud-detec...
They define any type of sharing as "Account Fraud and abuse of Terms of Service"
<-- However, some restrictions are in place, such as the number of active devices, the number of streams, and the number of downloaded titles. Many users across many platforms make for a uniquely large attack surface that includes content fraud, account fraud, and abuse of terms of service. Detection of fraud and abuse at scale and in real-time is highly challenging. -->
Between that and the "is the thing I really want to watch available or not?" queue lottery, I got fed up a few years ago and ditched them completely. The general streaming experience has become so awful that I'll just go to Youtube or Amazon and pay $4 to get precisely what I want for 48 hours, instead of googling to figure out who the hell currently has 'Heat' or whatever on their streaming platform.
It's amazing, we've looped around to 1999. You have to surf around to see where and if what you want is even available - people even make aggregate guides to tell you what's on where (a TV Guide, if you will). A decent amount of the time, depending on your tastes, the thing you want probably isn't available on a platform you're currently paying for.
Tragically, though, you don't get the irreplaceable experience of talking in person with a full-bore, unfiltered Video Store Guy.
People aren't pissed because they can't "use stuff for free" anymore. You can already pirate every show that's on netflix. People are upset because they were sold one thing, and now will not be getting what they paid for. I paid for x number of simultaneous devices/streams. I paid for a service which told me sharing passwords was perfectly fine. That's what I signed up for.
Now netflix changes the rules, which after multiple price increases, a library that has declined in quantity and quality, and an interface that is still terrible and increasingly stuffed with ads there is nothing mindblowing about the hate they're getting. They absolutely deserve to lose customers.
In theory it would be ok to have such a rule. But for years they have used the sharing of account as a marketing trick to get new users. Imagine that they have 3 offers, with the most expensive one not far from 2x times the entry level price. The main difference was the ability to have 2 or 4 person's watching at the same time. Normally you would not have a real need for taking more than basic plans, but they pushed people to take the highest plan and share.
Now that they reached a peak in term of users, they switch their speech and pretend that they have to do a change because people are abusing of something that was not allowed to them in the first place.
So they need to get a good lesson with mass cancellation and downsizing subscriptions.