Dumb Netflix Password Sharing Crackdown Will Arrive In US Early Next Year
from the meet-the-new-boss... dept
Undaunted by criticism that its plan is little more than a Comcast-esque cash grab, Netflix executives say they’re moving full speed ahead with a plan to begin cracking down on password sharing, a practice executives spent years previously encouraging.
In a letter to shareholders, Netflix said it would be bringing its password sharing crackdown to the US early next year, after having spent much of this year using Central and South American Netflix users as messaging test subjects:
“We’ve landed on a thoughtful approach to monetize account sharing and we’ll begin rolling this out more broadly starting in early 2023. After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create subaccounts (“extra member”), if they want to pay for family or friends.”
Under the program, Netflix will scan user accounts for users who use the service outside of the core subscription home, then charging the original account holder between $3.50 and $4.00 per month extra if those users don’t sign up for service on their own. Netflix is still being cagey about precisely what technical monitoring they’ll be using to confirm passwords are being shared outside the home.
Netflix had been testing the crackdown in markets like Peru and Argentina. It hasn’t gone particularly well; enforcement has been a bit of a mess, and incoherent messaging has confused users already facing tighter budgets thanks to global inflation.
As we’ve noted a few times, this is generally just a dumb cash grab by a company worried about soaring competition and sagging subscription totals. Netflix already recently imposed a general price hike on all users, and the company already monetizes these extra users by limiting the total number of concurrent streams per account, charging you more money if you want more simultaneous streams.
We’ve also noted how once Netflix joined the MPA, it began exhibiting a lot of the same character flaws as the organization. Like claiming that password sharing was a form of “piracy.” Or throwing around a lot of dubious numbers on how much money they’ll make with a crackdown (despite there being no solid evidence that harassed users won’t just switch to a Netflix competitor or go watch TikTok instead).
Netflix used to adore password sharing, back when it was trying to gain market share. Now that it’s a big dog facing an army of new competition but still trying to deliver quarterly-returns-at-any-cost to Wall Street, it’s exhibiting all the same character flaws as companies like Comcast. Namely a shift in focus away from disruption and quality, and toward nickel-and-diming its existing subscriber base.
Surely that will go differently from the last fifty times entrenched giants employed the same tactic, right?
Filed Under: competition, password sharing, piracy, streaming, tv, video
Companies: netflix
Comments on “Dumb Netflix Password Sharing Crackdown Will Arrive In US Early Next Year”
Netflix in 2017: Love is sharing a password.
Netflix in 2022: Sharing a password is piracy.
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Netflix in 2023: Love is giving us more money.
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Netflix in 2024, maybe: Why didn’t you give us more money?
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Netflix in 2019: joined the MPAA.
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Microsoft was the first one to do this in the late 1990’s. They went all out pushing EXTREMELY cheap MS Office licenses out to big corporate users like the hospital I worked at.
The catch? You had to give up all the licenses of Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3 you owned to them to get the rock-bottom prices.
And two years later, when the Office licenses “expired”, what had initially cost you $50 (plus your WP and 123 licenses) jumped to nearly $300 if you wanted to upgrade.
Microsoft, with one swoop, not only captured hundreds of thousands of corporate customers they also removed the fallback options for customers that didn’t want to be extorted by MS for upgrades (no more WP and 123 licenses, remember?).
And, as the cherry on top, they cut their competitors off from future upgrade revenues as well. I doubt anyone under 30 would even know what Wordperfect and 1-2-3 is any more, while Office is now ubiquitous.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the current Office suite, but that was some shady shite when they were first getting into the market.
If they are paying you for the stream, why does it matter where it is used?
This just creates a great reason to drop the service and move to another streamer.
What does that even mean? Do mobile device users have to pay more now when using a cellular network?
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Will Lotty drivers requires an account for each of their regular overnight stops?
Anyone remember when ATM’s were going to be cheaper for us to use because they’d get rid of tellers? And here we are with ATM fees because those things don’t take care of themselves.
What they do, not what they say, and whatever they say, always assume that eventually, they’ll do the worst.
yEAh I’m cUTTinG thE Cord
I’M so SmaRT…i’M saVing moNeY
All hail the New King! (same as the old king)
I said this befor but how much of this “competition” Netflix is supposedly facing is just segregation of content that once was on Netflix into various exclusive silos? I think that’s the root of Netflix’s recent woes.
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That’s the primary reason for the competition, yes: All the studios and corporations yanked a good chunk of their legacy catalog from Netflix to put what they owned on their own services. But this largely extends to movies from the 2000s onwards—movies older than that are more likely to end up in a vault instead of on a streaming service unless they’re exceptionally popular/well-known movies.
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How much culture has been locked up and lost because copyright allows for such control?
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More than the Bayside Advisory apologist will care to admit, out of fear of what maximalists will do if their ransom demands are not met.
Every different address?
Every time I start the engine and drive to a new RV park on my cross-country journey, will they add another $4.00 for being on that parks WiFi with a different IP address? Or will I just save myself another $20/month by cancelling… hmmm…
Considering
Everything is digital. NO MORE MAIL. What a savings?
The problem tends to be Who needs more money.
Not Why, as we know Money corrupts.
rolling out this thoughtful approach more broadly
After listening to my mowerless neighbor who borrows my lawn mower, I am going to offer him the ability to use his own lawn mower.
Using subaccounts will make management less easy. Now is the time for fat cats to foot the little guy’s bill!
If you’re approaching monetization, then you shan’t land on anything thoughtful. On the contrary, to root about for ideas by which you might squeeze money from other people is to be as a shiteating animal who delightedly roots about for faeces.
Okay, if travel is a part of someone’s job, and If they travel throughout the year, how would Netflix bill them?.
Pirates, as always, are unaffected.
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I’m not so sure, if they manage to drive off nearly all of their users they might finally figure out who is capturing the streams.
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It’s a sad fact that every form of enforcement mechanism only ever impacts the legitimate consumer – and sometimes that’s by design.
Netflix knows from the start that pirates aren’t a loss or gain for them. They’re irrelevant. So instead they find ways to make their existing customers pay more for less. In that they’re beginning to fit in with the copyright cult club they joined – and like every other member, delivering an incentive not to be among their customers.
Being a pirate used to be more edgy than this. Today that’s just the mainstream option you default to when your chosen streaming site drops yet another favorite from their channel.
OK, then… I want a refund on those 3 streams that I didn’t use at all this month.
huh?
“Under the program, Netflix will scan user accounts for users who use the service outside of the core subscription home, then charging the original account holder between $3.50 and $4.00 per month extra if those users don’t sign up for service on their own.”
That makes it sound like Netflix is going to be tacking on that fee on their own initiative if they think something fishy is going on…which could be someone using the account without the owner’s permission! Wow, great way to lose customers, Netflix.
Next year's cash grab will be ads
I saw recently that Disney will be rolling out their ad-supported tier soon, so how long will it be until Netflix follows?
And as most of us can very accurately predict, the ad-supported tier will be the same price as this year’s subscription and the tier without ads will be $5.00 more a month.
The thing is, I wouldn’t mind ads if they were relevant. If I’m watching Star Wars on Disney+ and they show me an ad for the new season of The Mandalorian, that’s great!
But I don’t want to see the same Ford ad that I saw on NBC 10 times in the last hour.
And I probably speak for a lot of people when I say this: the minute I see ANY political ad on Netflix or Disney+ I’m canceling the subscription and filing a complaint!
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A week from this coming Thursday.
Your complaint will be ignored because it won’t make Netflix money.
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They did say they’d cancel first, and while companies can and will shrug off one lost customer if a bunch of people start doing that that’s something that’ll get their attention.
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As That One Guy implies there’s a high risk it won’t just be a single lost customer.
This isn’t really new, guys. We’ve seen it in times past whenever streaming models were attempted for audio and video. It works for a brief period of time – sometimes only until it gets out of open beta – after which the model gets drowned in shit by marketing execs eager to maximize the profits and the customer base leaves.
It should be known by now. Every customer of a streaming service is exactly just that one inconvenience too many away from donning the tricorn hat and setting sail for The Bay.
Netflix is playing right at the line here, and I’m pretty sure that’s not a smart move now that it’s been well established they aren’t the only storefront on the block delivering the goods any longer.
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What with the fracturing of the video market and now we have to watch ads and pay penalties for unused profiles, it’s as if these MPA members want us to pirate their wares. They couldn’t be that stupid, could they?
Could they???
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Istopped asking the question on whether the MPAA could be “that” stupid after the issued their official estimate on what a pirated copy of a movie cost their industry – which by logical extension meant that the sum of piracy cost the moviemaking and record industry some 42 times the amount of money which existed in the world…
Unfortunately it turns out that you can purchase any amount of stupidity from legislators, and drown most judges in enough bullshit for them to cave on almost anything as long as your legal team is sufficiently well paid.
Hell, the entire TPB trial produced a guilty verdict on the charge of complicity to an alleged crime which was never proven to have taken place.
Stupid and unreasonable works as long as you’ve gilded it enough is the lesson the copyright cult keeps taking home.
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Once upon a post I laid out how a streamer could make bank with ads.
Rather than trying to fit 50 into 2 minutes, only sell 1 min segments and charge a premium.
You are selling a captive audience to your client, they only way you keep the client captive is to not piss them off.
“Stranger Things 4 was watched for 1.15 billion hours according to Netflix”
Learn from the Superb Owl, the time costs more because of the number of eyes it draws. How much could one get for offering all the advertising slots during stranger things to 1 company? 1 or 2 min blocks between episodes… hell the advertiser could even buy 2 min slots run 30 seconds & then tell the customer we love the show too so only small ads & then we’re back to the show.
But then that makes to much sense, no one would ever do it, and blah blah blah…
Because punishing your customers worked out so fsckign well for music and movies…
Quite the money saver there
Hmm, what I’m hearing is that assuming you don’t ditch Netflix entirely and look elsewhere for a streaming service there’s no reason to go beyond the absolute bare minimum service package if you’re paying for the service since there’s a good chance that you’ll be charged extra should anyone else(or you while traveling) not in your house use the extra concurrent streams you paid for.
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Based on their super duper IP address tracking & geolocation technologies…
That shit ALWAYS works perfectly…
falls to the ground laughing hysterically muttering something about a toilet on the road to a farm
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They don’t need IP & geolocation.
You use the netflix app on your phone, they can track you by phone identifiers.
You use the netflix app on a browser, they can fingerprint the browser and use data brokers to determine who you are and where.
Welcome to 2022 Internet where countries like the US failed to pass zero privacy regulation.
netflix losing customers
Netflix losing customers or having a decline in subscribers for the 1st time has less to do with sharing passwords and MORE to do with there are so many more streaming services and FREE streaming services with BETTER CONTENT THAN NETFLIX CURRENTLY HAS.
When it is time to choose whose streaming service(s) you want and how many. It is based SOLEY ON CURRENT CONTENT NOT who can I share with.
With so many more streaming options than ever before with BETTER CONTENT like Amazon, HBO max, paramount, disney, hulu, youtube and the free ones like Tubi and Pluto. You now have to choose how many you want, give more thought to your decision and how much do I want to pay.
And at this point Netflix has the lowest quality content of any of the services I have seen.
Improve your content and your subscribers will be there. Bundle with other streaming services like the rest do and maybe your subscribers might actually go up.