In 2000, everyone I knew pirated content because official platforms were broken, and piracy was more convenient and worked better.
In 2010 everyone I knew paid their media tax through Netflix or a similar provider since paid services were more convenient than piracy, and things just worked.
Somehow, in the past 2-5 years, piracy is quickly moving back as the more convenient option.
The core problem with entertainment is you're paying for fun. Spending hours fighting with broken service is not fun. Increasingly, these services provide negative value to me.
T-Mobile gave me free Paramount+. I was looking forward to it, since much of the content disappeared from Prime, some mid-series.
Paramount+ won't play on any device. It says I have to disable my ad blocker. They have code to break playback with an ad blocker, but it's broken, and disables playback even without and ad blocker. Paramount+ support says I should disable antivirus software, firewalls, and essentially, leave myself open to attacks.
Netflix selection has been getting worse too, with a proliferation of streaming services.
For the most part, I'm on Youtube. Youtube works. I can also use tools like yt-dlp to download Youtube content for plane flights, which is the major place I'd like to watch content. Most streaming services don't support use without internet access.
Oh -- and if I buy something, I'm liable to lose it. Google almost killed my whole library of purchases with the whole GSuite free thing, before backpedaling at the very last minute. For a few months, I had unnecessary stress and headache.
Piracy has all the content I want, works off-line, on any device, and in any player. Pirated content doesn't expire or break. If I weren't a high-profile figure liable to look bad in media, I'd go with piracy. It seems like the better option. It's certainly what I advocate to friends and family.
So… I have 8 weeks of vacation a year… does this mean I won’t be able to use my account for 6 of these weeks? What about going to my vacation home during weekends? I do it multiple times a month… why should I pay more for accessing Netflix from a different address? If they start this bullshit in my country they will loose a 10 years loyal customer playing for premium 4K streaming. I have as well prime, Disney+ And Apple TV+… I can survive without them!
It’s not that I can’t afford it… it’s a matter of principle! There is no valid reason for an INTERNET SERVICE to be bound to a geographical location (aside of squeezing people out of every penny possible)!
If you mean geographical location within the same country, sure.
If you mean across multiple countries, it gets dramatically more complex. Copyright holders sell streaming rights based on countries and all kinds of other continent negotiation details.
The endless pursuit of revenue to suit shareholders. Netflix can’t increase subs anymore as who would subscribe have already and luxuries are first to go in a depressed economy. So you look for the next low hanging fruit to launder.
> The endless pursuit of revenue to suit shareholders.
I don’t really understand these comments. Do you think Netflix is a charity? “Endless pursuit of revenue” is how they stay in business, employing people and yes, generating profits to shareholders.
Imagine turning this same thinking around at other groups I’d imagine you sympathize with like unionizing workers: “In their endless pursuit of revenue, workers have demanded pay increases”. Like wtf?
Compromising your products and services for profit is a slippery slope under normal circumstances, but streaming is a rather competitive market. What Netflix is doing is baffling, they are in the middle of a race for dominance.
I think Netflix was too late to realize that they need to become an entertainment company like Disney or HBO and not a tech company, because that's Amazon and the world is too small for another Amazon, just as it is too small for another Google. It doesn't matter how good their CDN is or how good they are at writing JavaScript libraries, they will keep losing subscribers if there is nothing to subscribe for.
I always hate to see it as well, when companies degrade their product for the tiniest bit of extra profit. It's the classic one-less-olive-in-airline-meal story. Remember when a Big Mac was actually a big burger? It's a very small burger, these days.
Netflix is somewhat ahead of this slippery slope here, in that when they started producing their own content it was third-rate from the start, very much quantity of quality. They were always going to fall off a cliff once subscriber numbers stopped growing, since eventually existing subscribers will tire of the crap they try to force-feed them, and decide the service isn't worth the price.
And it has also never been more synonymous with garbage food which makes you feel bad. Just because its profitable and "good for the company" doesn't mean it's good for product image and users.
You can get away with it when everyone is doing it. Most of the food and beverage industry compromises quality or quantity in one way or another. McDonald's is actually one of the better ones, they compromise the quantity, but otherwise they are consistent, innovative and good at observing customer trends and behaviors.
Trading customer goodwill for chump change is rarely the winning strategy, but it's sure a losing strategy in the middle of the streaming wars when other companies are trying their best to cater to their customers.
> I don’t really understand these comments. Do you think Netflix is a charity?
That next marginal dollar of revenue in the short term is often at the expense of subscriber goodwill in the long term. Rebuilding burned goodwill is very hard to do and dooms the business in the long run.
Yes all companies seek profits. All employees want more money. But all else being equally I support businesses that talk about what they can do for me, not what I can do for them. Same goes for employees I want to hire. I will happily pay money for someone to enthusiastically provide me a service. I will not be happy when that service declines and they respond by trying to nickel and dime me.
The two pieces of news I’ve heard about Netflix this year are stranger things season 4 is coming out and this. Why do I want to support a business who’s major contribution to the media landscape for 2022 is a new customer-hostile billing model?
People always say this, but there are plenty of companies that have been "chasing short term profits" for decades and are now worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars.
Plenty of armchair CEOs on this site who simply don't appreciate the market position and power of the companies they judge. I'm not saying this won't be bad for Netflix long run, I'm saying I simply don't know. But I would bet that Netflix management have spent a lot more time than either you or I to understand the implications.
So they should hand out subscriptions for free and go out of business? Should the actors and set crew take pay cuts for the free accounts? Would you be ok with paying double so others can have a free account? What do you propose is a reasonable way they can stay afloat and address freeloaders?
Why would you call them freeloaders? Netflix sold a number of streams, and now those streams are being restricted not by count but by kind.
If I gave some food away, and the restaurant I purchased it from called the recipient a free loader... I would have negative feelings about the restaurant such that a network effect would begin to take place after I kept telling people - just like this hn posting.
Edit: I guess you can argue that Netflix pricing is an insurance pool, where not always watching the streams you paid for goes into reducing the subscription cost (or raising profits). Having every subscriber let others use their downtime raises the subscription cost with that idea - but that is still contrary to years of their marketing.
Goodness. The number of products which explicitly discriminate against divorced families (or foreigners, for that matter) is astronomical. It's like pouring salt on a wound.
My wife and I live in the US. My kids spend the school year with their mom in Canada, and spend summers, vacations, and many weekends here in the US. We’re only about 100 miles away from each other, but it crosses an international border. For more than a decade, my kids have been on my account. All of their history and recommendations are attached to their profile in my account. If they want to move their profiles over to their mother’s account for the nine months of the year that they are in Canada, they can’t. They just use their existing profiles in my account at both homes.
In my case, nobody is “stealing” anything. My immediate family has had to deal with these international issues for about eight years, where the kids spend about three months in the US and nine months in Canada every year, crossing the border every 3-4 weeks.
I have no idea how Netflix’s changes are going to affect my family.
Taking another example: Disney+ and Hulu. Hulu is majority (but not entirely) owned by Disney (post-20th Century Fox acquisition). In the US, we have Disney+ and Hulu as separate services. In Canada there is no Hulu, but Disney+ offers something called “Star” which is more-or-less non-US Hulu. In other words, Disney is already getting 2 subscriptions out of me in the US for content that only requires one subscription in other countries.
But I don’t mind. Why? Because Disney has high quality content. Even if I don’t want to watch it, none of it is necessarily “bad”. Netflix, OTOH, churns out so much garbage. And most of their original shows get canceled far too early. I now avoid most new Netflix shows until it has a few seasons under its belt, because I’m tired of getting invested into shows that are canceled after a cliff-hanger.
Frankly, once I saw the prices rise $10/month -> $20/month I cancelled.
Plus, seeing shows like friends and breaking bad being replaced by big mouth and other Netflix content I find just gross (and not replacing it with content I enjoy). I cancelled. I was enjoying ozarks, and the comedy specials, but not at $180-$240/year and most of the comedy specials have become increasingly less interesting (when they came out at all — thanks lockdowns).
I think at lower prices they could honestly cover more niches because people were willing to pay for their interest (maybe 5% of the content). As the price increases more people don’t think that 5% is good enough for the price. And everyone has a different percent of content they like.
Imo this makes Netflix much more prone to lose customers when rising prices.
This is even more obnoxious because a lot of people who watch Netflix are younger. They travel, they go to school, etc.
How do they know where a home is? Are they going to require Location permissions? Are they going to do silly geoIP things which are worse than useless?
It sounds like they are using a combination of device fingerprinting and ip addresses. Will be interesting to see how many people get false positives from VPN's or just having their ip addresses cycled
> Make sure that the device is not connected to a VPN, proxy, or any unblocker service.
Relying on IP addresses for anything is a recipe for disaster. Device fingerprinting is even worse, given that everyone who is the least bit privacy-conscious has gotten quite good at resisting all kinds of fingerprinting techniques. I have 4 PCs I use frequently. If I watch Netflix on one today, get a new IP address tomorrow, and watch it on another device, I'm suddenly not at home anymore?
Their PR and marketing team clearly suck. I hope they've got a really good legal team, because they're going to need it.
I think their goal is to remove non-paying customers which is reasonable thing to do from their business perspective.
I'm not sure how exactly this would affect 99% of their paying customers. People who travel all the time would probably watch it on their laptops/tablets anyway so it won't affect them.
I think that it’s a reasonable goal. However, strategically I think that it isn’t wise given their other reductions in service quality. I had Netflix pretty early on when the catalog was vast and they would send DVDs immediately. Once it became clear they were starting to throttle the amount of DVDs being sent, I stopped subscribing. I think that this new policy will inspire a portion of their customer base to leave.
It’s still unclear to me how they count the two weeks on a location. If I go to my summer house every weekend, does that count? Or do they count when you use Netflix at multiple locations at the same time?
The comment you responded to was neither arrogant or superfluous. Prior to the internet people had cable TV subscriptions for their house and vacation house. The norm was TV subscription being location based. Now with the internet that changed a bit. Netflix is trying to come up with a way to ensure that people aren’t using a subscription login “unjustly” (as Netflix defines this). It’s a tricky problem to solve.
It’s not really exactly the same thing! A web services should not be location bound! What if next to access your email you have to be home or pay for any extra location? Following your previous line of reasoning to access standard mail you have to be home!
It wasn’t a line of reasoning or a justification. I was not justifying anything or arguing for or against anything. Web services are already location bound. For example, there are YouTube videos available in the U.S. but not in Russia. I’m certain there are emails legal to be sent and read in Iran that are not legal to be sent in the U.S. One state in the U.S. is attempting to ban abortion information being sent to people within that state’s borders (likely just posturing but the point stands).
I can see from Netflix’s perspective that maybe the cost of allowing too many streams from one account is not profitable. Clearly they think this is a problem.
The reason for restricovodeos is licensing on the content in every country… within the same country no restrictions apply. I do understand Netflix point of wanting to restrict account sharing… but I don’t see why this should impact people that simply move around a lot! Another example: I have a friend that is a consultant… basically every week is in a different place! No Netflix at all for him?
I think there must be a number of hours of streaming per month for one account beyond which it is unprofitable for Netflix. I think they are trying to get more accounts below this number.
I already use my parents' account, so it wouldn't apply to me so much. I wouldn't buy a Netflix account just for the weekends though; I suppose everyone will have to figure out how to spend their entertainment dollars to suit themselves in the brave new reality.
Genuine question to commenters that are poopooing this: why? Price hikes are annoying, and the content quality has been decaying recently, but those are separate issues.
Why shouldn’t Netflix seek to clamp down on account sharing? This seems to strike a nice balance that makes it easy to continue sharing, and not disrupt existing profiles, etc whilst charging a small premium for the privilege.
I suspect there are also people who share their account out of inertia. Some kids go off to college and stay on their parents’ account. Sometimes they don’t think about it since the password is stored on the app.
Also, Netflix might be losing money when people share their account and want to get to a place where the profit per account increases and then go from there.
They’re not really separate issues. On some level we’re supporting a company vision and direction. Right now that direction says “we’re going to try and eek out every last dollar and we don’t care about the quality of our content”. I think this would be a different story if most of their energy was focused on creating a compelling product. “Look at all this great media were building as part of a completing vision and we have to raise prices to accommodate is a different narrative than “everything sucks and we don’t care give us more money”
I never shared my account with anyone… I am the sole users and yet this policy would cost me money and issues! I travel way more than 2 weeks a year (in civilised countries like France I have 8 weeks of vacation a year)… plus I often visit my vacation home… don’t see why they should charge me for that (while I am on my vacation home there is nobody using Netflix at my place… there is always only one stream at a time)! So if they do put it in place where I live that can say goodbye to a very loyal customers (I subscribed 9 years ago)
Their goal is to monetize those users, even a fraction of them. Booting them from the platform doesn’t actually do them any good. They are effectively offering a large discount to account sharers.
In 2010 everyone I knew paid their media tax through Netflix or a similar provider since paid services were more convenient than piracy, and things just worked.
Somehow, in the past 2-5 years, piracy is quickly moving back as the more convenient option.
The core problem with entertainment is you're paying for fun. Spending hours fighting with broken service is not fun. Increasingly, these services provide negative value to me.