Other than myself and my GF, most of the people on this list watch something on Netflix every couple of months, when I or someone/something else recommend them a movie or show.
I don't want them to use my profile, because we then obviously can't watch the same things, and it'll break my recommendations.
I get why Netflix wants to split up accounts. Currently, they get approximately $240 per year from me and my family. If everyone has to create their own account, that number goes up to $1200.
But that's how my family lives. Parents are separated, grandparents live in their own house, my gf at home with her mom and I alone.
My dad in turn pays Disney+ for me, Spotify is paid by my GFs mother, grandma cooks me a couple of Lasagnas every year. We just share these services.
Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
In the end, these streaming platforms are probably right that you shouldn't be allowed to share accounts if you don't live under the same roof, but it still kinda pisses me off.
Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...
I think that you are upset about the subscription model not serving your use case. Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available. Customers instead share their accounts with family members. It is dirty rotten piracy and anyone doing it is stealing bread from the mouths of babes, but that's what happens when the legitimate system fails to offer the delivery model that the customer wants.
My story: I have amazon prime, but no proper screens that can watch it (linux) and there isn't much on prime that I care to watch anyway. So my parents in another state use the account. Should amazon care? They are still only streaming to one IP but the reality is that we are all pirates.
> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available. Customers instead share their accounts with family members
PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Ultimately the best delivery model for the customer would be $0 for unlimited free streaming of movies and music, of course that would tank the industry and stop new production so a balance must be found in terms of what customers will tolerate vs what is needed to fund new content production.
> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
So that's $10. Or sign up for just a month and then cancel. I know people who have Netflix for a few months, and then another service for a few months and so on.
I still remember having to rent movies/TV or buying on DVD as my main way of watching... at 4-6 movies a month and ~$20-30 per season of TV, you'd have to have quite a few streaming services to match that. It's all about convenience vs cost.
> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available.
and
> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Yes, PPV is available, but it costs the same to watch a couple movies every month as to subscribe to a whole streaming service. That makes it effectively unavailable (at a reasonable price) for many consumers.
Why isn't a la carte video available at a reasonable markup (say, 200% the cost of 2 hours of a streaming service given the average monthly viewing time)?
Costs like those of the Netflix hardware deployed to the edge, including maintenance (and business relation maintenance) don't scale down anywhere near linearly with hours of content watched, neither does the cost of content licensing (especially, I would assume, exclusives).
So, expecting prices to scale that way for limited-quantity purchases is unreasonable.
I think customers end up achieving similar costs by sharing accounts, or by signing up for one month per year, or by skipping Netflix altogether because there isn't enough content they want to watch to justify the monthly fee.
I think this reflects the reality that for a product with low marginal costs, bundling provides better value for the consumer. If a company is going make the investment to build and operate a video streaming service and acquire you as a customer, it only costs them a few dollars more to let you watch the whole catalogue on demand (the effort to amass this catalog is largely amortized across the customer base). Competing for each individual pay per view purchase is a much worse business to be in, and that’s reflected in the poorer value proposition offered to customers. There’s also some price discrimination occurring (selling to people who really want to watch this specific movie that isn’t offered in their favorite streaming service, or who don’t watch enough movies to subscribe).
The same can be observed in some other industries: museum membership, ski pass.
you have (or your distro has) installed the widevine drm plugins for firefox (or whatever browser) that are included by default on windows and mac os. these are proprietary plugins, but some convenience-oriented distros distros include them because many users expect them.
some linux users are on linux because they want to eliminate proprietary software from their computer altogether. which means no access to un-broken drm media.
Everything and anything it possible on linux. The question is whether I want to bother. I could probably disable my browser's security features and get it working, install some proprietary whatever, but it isn't worth than hassle imho. I've got better stuff to watch than netflix/amazon junk. Whenever I have a hour to kill my first choice tends to be the BBC.
I think it depends on how mainstream your distro is, or maybe on what browser you use. When I used Linux, every streaming platform ever told me that my browser wasn't compatible to stream.
> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
This seems more like an edge case. If grandma is only watching a couple movies per year, would Netflix even bother throwing up a warning message? If she didn’t have her own profile in your account, it would be difficult for Netflix to even know if this was a shared account or if you were just logging in at her house during an occasional visit.
They’re not rolling this out to go after grandma watching a couple movies per year.
It’s more likely that they’re targeting the heavy users who share a single account. People who would have their own subscription in a heartbeat if they could no longer exploit the shared account loophole.
>If grandma is only watching a couple movies per year, would Netflix even bother throwing up a warning message?
Yes. In every scenario that a company could cut cost, they've done it. If they haven't done it yet, they will do it. Absolutely 100% Netflix is going to cut grandma off.
What's it to Netflix to throw up a message saying "little Timmy, if you're there in the room with grandma then it shouldn't be a problem for you to enter the 6 digit code we just sent to your phone." That's what they're trialing now. Next you're going to have to enter a code even if you don't share your account just in case or due to some error or other excuse when it becomes a PR problem, such as when Netflix bans a customer and cancels their account because boyfriend was trying to watch a movie while girlfriend was at work and didn't see the code on her phone until it was too late, which is also inevitably going to happen, and you're going to read a reddit thread about it that has a score of 35k and 10x gold and Netflix is going to formally apologize for the error and reinstate her account and then it is going to become par for the course after that. That's where this is going, bad UX all round because some middle management can make a bonus by cutting costs, or because Netflix's revenue is falling and they just don't want to admit the cause and refuse to correct the error, like IBM and every other failing company did.
You actually bring up a good point. I thought that they'll just show this message to everyone, but maybe you're right and they analyze the usage somehow to only notify people who are abusing it.
Else, how do you handle people going on business trips and vacations?
> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...
Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway.
It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch, along with collaborative watching, which is a perk netflix does not have.
Don’t know if I really buy the “piracy is the only option” line any more. It was for years. But you can now legally pay for the content you want, you just don’t like the price.
Netflix shuffles media constantly, you have to subscribe to five different streaming sites to watch a show and even then it could disappear next month, and you can't share the account with anyone else. To get good coverage of streaming services you need to subscribe to several.
Meanwhile in piracy land, you sign up to a seedbox, press a button to set up Plex+Sonarr/Radarr, then you're done. Type in the names of the things you want, share it with as many people as you want, etc. Literally all you have to bother with is disk usage and most of the sites I looked at last month had a minimum offering of 500GiB, some boasting 1TB of disk space -- so even that isn't much of a problem.
That includes Plex + etc + 4TB Disk. One-button setup for all the supported services.
So like I said, all this measure does is drive people to piracy. They're literally faceplanting on their way to extract more and more money from people.
You could always legally pay. The price was quite high because you needed to pay for cable + premium channels in addition to renting at blockbuster video.
However with all the streaming services it's not just as high if not higher if you want everything. Not to mention the crazy Disney fee ($30+ / movie in addition to the monthly subscription). It's great as a DIS shareholder, but pretty terrible for their fans.
I feel like this is not true in regards to older material. Shows like wkrp in Cincinnati can never be made available with all of the music liceasing issues. Some classic shows like soap get censored. Some shows just go missing. Most never make it to streaming and many aren't available for purchasing.
Piracy is just as important. The reason why more don't is because it is easier to just pay and perhaps the content is not worth the effort anymore. People watch movies on fast forward now, play games on phones while watching and generally tv or movie viewing as a background activity.
When was it not an option to pay for the content people are trying to sell you?
The problem was UX friction. You had to go to a video store, rent a movie, get ready to be raped with fees, or go to a library and hope they have it, or go to a second hand store and browse the selection. You had to have a special piece of hardware or ten, and if a movie you wanted to watch was on a format you didn't have, too bad. That's why people used to watch the same movies every so often. Watch a movie? Doesn't matter if we had seen it already. Let's watch it again anyway. This is how movies like The Big Lebowsky and Friday got their followings, people watching them repeatedly. Like music. This touches on the social impacts of the paid subscription model that is off topic so I won't delve into that.
And then Netflix changed everything. And then everyone else got in on the game, and now you've got worse UX friction than before. You've got to determine which service has the movie you want to watch. You've got to pay for that service, now it looks like per person, for just that movie. And if you want to watch 4 or 5 movies? You might have to have as many as 4 or 5 monthly subscriptions. Or you can rent it for 1.99. But buy it? No, you cannot buy it. I mean, you can, but who has a DVD player and space for a bunch of DVDs?
But tpb has all the movies. And you can own them. And they're all in one place. And as a bonus, they're free if you don't include your VPN service.
Side note, how is tpb different from a library exactly? Besides scale and efficiency, in principle, what's the difference between tpb and a library?
Free is the best price, especially for broke a college kid. It's too tempting to be honest. Streaming a torrent stops me from ever paying for a streaming service.
I'm actually proud to say I've never paid for a streaming service of any kind at all, or cable TV for that matter And I'm not a young kid. I've bought albums and VHS tapes and DVDs before. Rented movies. But never once paid for a subscription service of any kind. And I never will.
Of course I don't "consume content" (I hate that term, what's with PR and marketing people reducing everything to a business case?) so much anymore, so I'm not quite the pirate I once was. In all honesty, if I'm going to sit in front of a screen, I'd rather talk to people like you on the internet than watch the super strong american hero defeat the bad guy for the gazillionth time, except this time they are sure to remind me that I'm a bad bad man for some belief I have.
The number wouldn't go up to $1200 - most of your family would get by just fine without Netflix because it simply isn't worth what it costs to them. The needle will move on Netflix's revenue and subscriber count, and their costs will slow down. And largely the people affected will forget about this.
The really fair way to price this is by concurrent viewers, independent of location, and they already have that feature. I too have my in-laws logged into my Disney+ account which they never use. But if they watch my kids, and my kids want to pick up where they left off on the Bluey episode, it's both my profile they need and my responsibility to pay for it.
I also have this use case and think it's really important. When I was a kid you could take a favorite VHS or DVD with you. Now you take your subscription. Sure, I guess you could take a phyusical authorized device (e.g. an iPad) with you, then screen cast it. But that requires grandma to figure out screen casting. And I'm trusting my kid with a $300 device instead of a $15 media artifact. Lame.
I'm actually curious if the physical device looks any more innocent in Netflix's future policies than straight-up credential sharing. It's still coming from a new IP.
If I have a Netflix account and I (post-pandemic) go to an ANB rental I would be pissed if my account didn't work there.
I subscribed the first month Netflix came to Denmark (my country) and I kept the subscription up for a decade until they started to degrade the stream too much. They fixed that and I eventually came back but stuff like that would turn me of for good.
> In the end, these streaming platforms are probably right that you shouldn't be allowed to share accounts if you don't live under the same roof
How many individual users are allowed on an account and whether they need to have any particular relationship (residential or otherwise) are completely arbitrary decisions.
What is it that you think is appropriate for you to be pissed off about? You pay for Netflix for you and your household, not for anyone that happens to be related to you. Has that ever not been the case?
The Netflix plan I pay for allows two simultaneous views and permits different profiles. On what possible ground should it matter what physical location those two screens are viewed at?
> On what possible ground should it matter what physical location those two screens are viewed at?
On the terms of services.
"4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through the service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household."
I don't agree with it, and I do pay for two simultaneous screens, but that's how it is.
Hmm, I am not sure if that is even legal here in Europe, there are lots of rights in commercial contracts that I can't sign away. How I use a subscription may well be among them.
Not that it greatly matters. I don't share my Netflix account with anybody.
Perhaps because they've doubled their streaming service's cost, reduced their content amount and availability, and are now properly warning they are going to be cracking down on geographically distant usage by users of the same account.
At this point I'm paying 20 USD/m for Netflix, roommate for HBOMax, friend's password (via reciprocal sharing) for Disney+, and our online TV service, which my elderly disabled mother can't go without.
The post-cable/satellite TV revolution has tripled my costs from what it used to be.
> geographically distant usage by users of the same account
But that's just it. A Netflix account isn't valid "for you and anyone you think it is". It's valid only for people in the same household. The thing they are cracking down on is people using the account in a way that they were never supposed to.
If your account is usable by 2 people of the same household and 1 moves out and continued paying half of of the Netflix bill... would you expect them to be booted out? So how does Netflix make a differentiation?
> The post-cable/satellite TV revolution has tripled my costs from what it used to be.
Huh. You must have had a really great deal on that nonspecific cable/satellite. Every time I’ve looked at TV packages since before streaming services even existed, it was $50/mo before various fees and at least $70 on the bill, just for basic cable.
I pay Netflix for 4 concurrent streams. They never said I have to limit usage of one account to one household. I should be able to share the login with 100 of my friends and it will be fine since not more than 4 can watch at a time.
> Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...
All subscription services must account for some form of average use. High usage customers are offset by low usage. Thus, it is likely with so many people on your account that others are subsidizing your account's usage.
Nevertheless, I don't think Netflix cares about your low usage family members, like your grandmother. They care about your high usage family and want to get them in their own account.
Netflix already has subscription tiers that varies the number of screens that can simultaneously watch or device downloads. Perhaps Netflix could help honest people be honest by creating tiers with modest increases for different households. Maybe $5 for each additional household?
I am sure they have discussed and don't yet have a great way of enforcing such. One option could be true "sub-accounts" where the sub-account pays for the bump of $5 with a credit card that must be tied to a different address?
From that use case, what is likely to happen is everyone having their own account but being more active in canceling and rejoining. I doubt Netflix revenue will increase to much above $240 in the end.
As others already pointed out, I wrote that it's per year.
But I quickly looked at it, the amounts I mentioned are even too low. Converted to USD, I pay $23 per month. So $276 for one person, or $1380 for my use-case.
I think this is going to have the exact opposite effect of what they're going for. I know plenty of people who split the cost of an account because they can't justify the full price. The continual price hikes, and now this?
I'm sure the bean counters have done the math and they'll come out ahead, but losing content + raising prices and now killing off people sharing accounts is just a bad look. This is yet another category of business where I think they'd be far better off being private, so in theory there isn't constant pressure to continue increasing revenue. Once you have market penetration, the only way you're increasing revenue is through customer hostile actions (like increasing the price of the service while decreasing the cost to provide it).
> This is yet another category of business where I think they'd be far better off being private, so in theory there isn't constant pressure to continue increasing revenue.
Netflix has borrowed billions (and billions) of dollars to get where they are. As a private entity they've gone bust seven or eight years ago.
Netflix priced themselves artificially low to grow, based on debt. That set unrealistic consumer expectations and they might have to face the consequences of that eventually, but Netflix's terms literally always said that accounts could only be shared with people living in the same household as you.
Right, but at the same time, Netflix also prices their product tiers around being able to pay for more simultaneous streams on the same account. Account sharing is literally a selling point for them.
Ok so, what if I live with you but work in another city I travel to every week, do I not live with you? What if I'm a trucker on the move? What if I'm in the army and getting deployed?
Hastings once said that someone going to college sharing their credentials with their family at home is fine by him.
Let's apply some common sense, right. If you're a trucker sharing your account with your spouse at home is probably fine. Sharing your account with two dozen trucker buddies and fifteen cousins probably isn't.
In those 3 examples you’d still both file your taxes at the same address and be legally eligible to vote there too.
Seems easily distinguished from the case of independent adults who sleep in different homes every night and have separate addresses on all their tax forms, drivers’ license and voting registrations...
So is Netflix going to require tax information on everyone in the household? How can they tell the difference from their end I think is one of the questions being presented
Netflix doesn't seem to be cutting anyone off here.
They're just forcing 2FA on accounts that meet some kind of threshold of "suspicious" behaviour. There's likely a lot of metrics being used to identify that.
Seems like they aren’t asking for anything in particular for identity verification but just creating a slight annoyance via asking to re-verify.
Facebook does prompt people to upload Photo IDs sometimes but I doubt Netflix wants to get that invasive.
(I had interpreted the question as related to how to interpret the T&C. Agree that ultimately, it’s impossible to enforce the existing T&Cs to the exact letter, although some combination of annoyances and mild shamings might affect user behavior and presumably this is what they are testing.)
Presumably, this person that is on the move is still using the same device no matter where they go. Their login session will be the same, just coming from a different IP.
>Netflix has borrowed billions (and billions) of dollars to get where they are. As a private entity they've gone bust seven or eight years ago.
Netflix has been profitable since at least 2005... they may not have grown as quickly, but I'd need some data to back up the claim they'd be bankrupt without billions in investment.
>but Netflix's terms literally always said that accounts could only be shared with people living in the same household as you.
I never said anything to the contrary. But it's no secret to netflix or anyone else that account sharing happens. This wouldn't be a news story otherwise. It also doesn't change the fact it's customer hostile and clearly an attempt to increase revenue.
Netflix would not remotely resemble its current form and likely would have been acquired years ago if they did not pivot to their own content. Switching to their own content required and still requires huge amounts of money; est. 17bn last year[0]. Additionally, the gross profit number is a flawed number for many reasons; try looking at operating or net income or anything farther down the income statement from basic revenue. Netflix has no option but to finance content spend with debt as they do not generate enough FCF to cover content spend and will quickly fall behind competitors if they don't.
>Netflix would not remotely resemble its current form and likely would have been acquired years ago if they did not pivot to their own content.
You can't acquire a private company unless they're willing to sell.
>Switching to their own content required and still requires huge amounts of money; est. 17bn last year[0].
I don't follow your point? Private companies can take a loan just as easily as public. If they were unable to attain the financing they wanted, they'd still have plenty of their own content, just not as much.
>Additionally, the gross profit number is a flawed number for many reasons; try looking at operating or net income or anything farther down the income statement from basic revenue. Netflix has no option but to finance content spend with debt as they do not generate enough FCF to cover content spend and will quickly fall behind competitors if they don't.
I'd suggest you do the same. Their cash balance increased from $5 billion to $8 billion last year. They took out "debt" to finance their movies because money is cheap right now. Nothing they've done required them being a public company, and nothing you've shown makes me believe they couldn't be in exactly the same position they currently are as a private company. They didn't even start borrowing money of significance until 2012, I still don't believe for a second they'd be "bankrupt" as a a private company.
> I don't follow your point? Private companies can take a loan just as easily as public. If they were unable to attain the financing they wanted, they'd still have plenty of their own content, just not as much.
Private companies face a higher cost of capital than equivalent public companies and are unable to borrow as much money as public companies are able to. This is basic finance 101 stuff. Without debt financing, they would not have been able to begin their pivot when they needed to. Netflix is able to borrow at much lower rates than a company with the same financials solely because they are a large public company. Google "equity cushion" if you're unfamiliar with the term.
> I'd suggest you do the same. Their cash balance increased from $5 billion to $8 billion last year. They took out "debt" to finance their movies because money is cheap right now. Nothing they've done required them being a public company, and nothing you've shown makes me believe they couldn't be in exactly the same position they currently are as a private company.
Yes, Netflix is doing much better financially over the past few years and especially in the past year given the pandemic. I don't see how their cash balance is relevant in the face of content spend 2-3x that much. The initial contention was over content spend and a misleading gross profit number.
>They didn't even start borrowing money of significance until 2012, I still don't believe for a second they'd be "bankrupt" as a a private company.
They started borrowing when they needed to pivot to their own content, had to do so at pretty high rates, and luckily succeeded in their pivot.
Throughout this, I don't see any acknowledgement of where streaming was back then and how competitive the space has become since then. Netflix needs to spend on content or it will get left behind. A smaller Netflix offers no competitive edge right now and a smaller Netflix years ago would have been held hostage by content owners while being unable to have any real control over sub pricing; see poorly handled rate increases years ago.
>Private companies face a higher cost of capital than equivalent public companies and are unable to borrow as much money as public companies are able to. This is basic finance 101 stuff. Without debt financing, they would not have been able to begin their pivot when they needed to. Netflix is able to borrow at much lower rates than a company with the same financials solely because they are a large public company. Google "equity cushion" if you're unfamiliar with the term.
I guess I took a different finance 101 than you did - it was at an accredited university though, so I'm fairly certain they weren't making things up as we went. I've literally never heard of a public company being able to borrow more because they were public. Quite the opposite actually, as a private company with a solid financial track record isn't subject to the whims of shareholders and short-term quarterly-returns based internal investment.
Now if you're pets.com that is burning through cash like it's water in the hopes of making money 20 years down the road... that's a different story. That's also not Netflix.
Private companies face a higher cost of capital than equivalent public companies
Why is that? (Sorry, I never took finance 101.) Is it because public companies can more easily put up corporate ownership as collateral for the loan? Or because of the extra scrutiny they get from the SEC?
> Netflix has been profitable since at least 2005..
Only because you're allowed to not count issuing junk bonds towards your profitability. Netflix only started having cash positive quarters this year, and has fifteen billion dollars in debt, generally going up by four billion dollars a year.
Netflix literally could not have afforded the interest on those junk bonds as a private company. It was only able to borrow so cheaply on the promise of it's growth.
(And this year is unusually friendly to them due to Covid, I do not think they are suddenly actually profitable, they just didn't spend nearly as much as normal.)
I am infinitely happier with my stream service mix vs my last cable subscription. And if you consider their competition other streaming services, Netflix is already the 800lb gorilla in the room. It's why you saw things like CBS+ get rolled into Paramount, or HBO up their ante by bundling a ton of other brands content into HBOMAX. Not enough people want a single channel offering, even for $3.99.
Personally, I have to agree with you that they have a long way to go before I'm going to be as annoyed with them as I am with many of my other service providers (cell, cable, ISP)
How am I the problem? I’m simply explaining that it’s not a single subscription. The whole reason people started cutting cable was because they could replace a $100-150/m cable bill with Netflix. Now the content is getting so divided we’re almost back to where we left off.
If you live in a household then it’s easy to run into the situation I explained. I don’t use 5+ streaming services, but the household does because people have different preferences.
The article clearly mentions that credentials sharing is currently used as a mitigation to the balkanization of streaming services, allowing the cost of all major subscriptions to be spread across several people, essentially bringing down the per-person cost to a reasonable, single subscription's cost.
Cracking down on this doesn't mean people will start paying, they will just go back to illicit means of watching the content.
My mom and grandma currently share my Netflix account. If Netflix cracks down on it they aren't going to start torrenting, but will either get their own subscriptions or not watch Netflix at all. I assume the suits at Netflix have run the numbers and are confident that enough people will fall into the first category to justify this move.
Really? The offerings I looked at last month (I didn't actually buy one, to put it clearly, because I realised they don't suit my purposes) were zero-setup required. Sonarr/Radarr supposedly allows you to pick media just by typing in names, and all the dashboard offerings boasted one-click setup of all of those.
One seedbox with plex can serve many people though. You can easily imagine cases where the tech savvy family member is running it for the whole extended family.
This kind of effort (presumably the verifications will be constant - one location being verified will trigger re-verification on all other locations) will just make people realize that piracy isn't that difficult to set up either and might make them reconsider using streaming services entirely.
They aren’t unlimited, there are 5. Profiles are defined as being in the same household. The reasons are easy to understand, if you think about it. Netflix is providing separate queues and ratings for people who have to share, and household sharing is unavoidable in some cases, such as when using shared devices like ipads or game consoles.
Or, you could just visit Netflix.com, where they explain the reasons behind profiles. “Profiles allow different members of your household to have their own personalized Netflix experience. You can have up to 5 profiles on a single Netflix account.” https://help.netflix.com/en/node/10421
Sharing accounts outside of a household is stealing. I fail to see a big difference between that and any other form of illegal downloads where one person pays and someone else copies. I got some downvotes but nobody bothered to answer the question: how is using someone’s account who doesn’t live with you different in practice from torrenting, from a legal perspective?
Stealing/theft requires the misappropriation of goods/services that can not be replaced. I.e. once they are gone you do not have them. A real world example of this is stealing a DVD.
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized copying of something. The original good is still around, but someone has made a copy. A real world example of this is copying a dvd that you borrowed from a friend.
Torrenting is copyright infringement as you never had a right to the content (unless you owned the original DVD).
Streaming in my opinion different, you have been given access to a paid stream that is password and drm protected. Netflix is still getting paid. They give you n streams for $/month.
Netflix's TOS says that is against their rules, but they also don't implicitly ban it...
It’s a fair point that copyright infringement might be a better term, except I’m not certain it applies here which is why I didn’t use that term. I think I’ve even used the same argument myself in the past that we shouldn’t call torrenting theft because the owner doesn’t lose it. I’m all for clarity. However, your definition of stealing is incorrect, the word is not limited to physical goods that cannot be replaced. Stealing is simply taking something you don’t have the right to take. (Look it up, I googled dozens of definitions.) Yes I might be using it as a shorthand for breaking copyright law or something else more specific. Breaking copyright law is a subset of stealing.
> Netflix is still getting paid.
Torrents are also commonly paid for by the first viewer, the person who ripped the DVD, so borrowing someone’s account is no different in that respect. Netflix is subtly different in that you still need an account, and because of that, a single account might not be shared as widely as a single torrent. The monetary discrepancy between a single torrent and a million shared accounts might be equal or even larger for Netflix, who knows. I wouldn’t be very surprised if Netflix believes they’re seeing larger losses than pirated movies, precisely because borrowing accounts is so widely believed to not be illegal, and because people feel like it’s no different from using profiles, so cross-household account sharing occurs more often.
> they don’t implicitly ban it
They don’t have to if it’s against the law already.
How is torrenting different from going to the library and borrowing DVD for free? Besides scale and efficiency, in principle, how is tpb different from a library?
Well, for one the library has a legal right to lend the DVD, and it can only lend it one at a time, and the library doesn’t make it’s own copy nor do you (legally). That’s a pretty massive difference. So, not just one but two principled fundamental differences: 1- the library’s actions are legal, and 2- in the library case, no copies are being made by either party.
How does the answer to this question help inform my question?
These are not differences in principle. These are just practical differences that affect efficiency of distribution of information, with a little moralistic paint on it.
There's no difference in principle between homosexuality in the UK in the 60s and now. But it was illegal then, not now. Something being legal or illegal is not a fundamental difference. Something being fundamentally different can be a reason something should be legal or illegal, but something being illegal cannot be used as a justification that it should be.
As far as copying, looking at the fundamental principle that libraries operate on, that information should be made available to as many people as possible as best we can regardless of their socioeconomic status, the only difference I can find is that torrenting and copying are more efficient than libraries in achieving the stated goal. When libraries do it inefficiently it is regarded as a virtue, when we do it ourselves more efficiently without institutional support we are regarded as thieves. But fundamentally, are they not the exact same thing?
My question addresses yours because the answer, if it is "they're not fundamentally different in principle" which is my position, negates yours entirely, and if you can show me how they're fundamentally different in principle, negates that very powerful and apt criticism of your position. The answer basically determines if you're right or I'm right.
I asked what the difference is from a legal perspective, and you’re saying there is no difference in principle when the law changes. That’s clearly a misunderstanding on your part.
Your argument about efficiency is reductionism, it’s completely ignoring copyright and law. I didn’t make the law nor am I defending copyright or the law, but those are absolutely relevant, you can’t pretend they are “moralistic” details and ignore them. At least not if you want your argument to be taken seriously.
> But fundamentally, are they not the exact same thing?
Correct, they are not the exact same thing, not fundamentally, not in principle, and not in practice. Libraries operate on the principle of paying for copies of media in order to loan them out 1 at a time. They do not operate on the principle of making their own copies of media nor on distributing as many copies as possible.
Your answer, in my view, is irrelevant to my unanswered question.
"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gaben
Let's use the same analogy for a young struggling artist - "The best way for me to stop buying $1 copies of your $100 paintings is for you to give me a service that better than what I get from pirates."
This is why we can't have nice things. Because people feel entitled to others people's work.
Pirates don't pirate because they can get it cheaper. Some do, but not by and large. If that was the case, streaming services wouldn't have become a multi billion dollar a year industry that revolutionized the music, movie and TV industry. I guarantee you every single 30 something with a Netflix account had limewire or bearshare or something on their computer as teenagers, but now they don't, because the money was never the prime motivator.
Pirates pirate because of bad UX, which Netflix solved for them and others copied, which the entire industry now seems hell bent on breaking again. And they think their size and the DMCA and the learning curve to pirating nowadays can prevent it from happening, so sure, let's abuse our customers now that we think they can do nothing about it. But this will fail. If it is easier to learn how to use torrents and mega and whatever else than it is to navigate the plethora of services to find what you want (at the current rate we will need TV Guide again soon) and call your girlfriend at work to get the 2fa code they just sent to her phone, people will do it.
Gaben's quote on piracy was about 2 1/2 years after the big Spore DRM debacle [0], which affected legitimate customers. I've been using Steam for who knows how long and have never had the DRM be an issue, even after several computer upgrades and motherboard replacements. I just have to log in and I can redownload all my games with no issue at all.
Yes, Steam is DRM, but it's sane DRM.
> has a variety of mechanisms to prevent account sharing yeah?
Well...yeah. You aren't supposed to share accounts.
> It's a nice soundbite, but even he doesn't believe it.
It's not just about DRM. When he talks about it being a "service problem", it's not just about the ability to simply play games. When you buy from Steam, you get automatic updates, cloud saves, community integration (such as the Workshop for installing mods and other user-made content), built-in screenshot management features, and more. If you pirate the game, you get none of that.
Steam gives me auto-updates, not worrying about malware being packed in cracks, and an easy way to invite my friends to the same game server I'm playing on. Gaben was absolutely right.
What is the solution for shared custody of children? I have three kids that spend half their time at their moms. Are their Spotify and Netflix accounts (and mine) going to get shutoff? Is there some sort of appeal process?
According to the article you can just verify through a code that any devices are yours.
My hunch is this is only going to cull the second layer and beyond of password sharing (people you wouldn’t feel comfortable texting and asking for the verification code).
“Please Relogin” doesn’t give you the message that they’re on to what you’re doing. I don’t assume anything when I’m asked to login again. Guilt can be a powerful motivator for people who share accounts because many of them know that you’re not really supposed to do it, but it’s been more or less tolerated.
Would assume on that it’s because many people probably have the password memorized or written down somewhere as opposed to having to proactively ask someone for the verification code.
I'm the main account on a Spotify family account. One or two times in the past five years they have asked all the members of the family plan to enter the home address on the account. Technically we're all supposed to live together, but we never have. They've never done anything about it, even though it's very obvious by looking at location or IP address. Maybe it'll be a similar gentle reminder by Netflix
This tells me netflix is seeing a revenue / growth issues in the near future. The content release schedule has been slowing. Growth is probably at peak and with the Disney and Amazon pressure things are looking a little rough.
They did the increase subscriber price a few months ago. I think they were shocked by the number of people who cancelled. They can't go in that direction. Funds for content have been spent unwisely. 20-25 million dollar comedy show payouts, cancelling popular shows and under replacing expiring content.
Could you imagine living with your spouse who owns the account on their email; your spouse is at work or on a business trip - maybe even out of the country, and you get this screen (or maybe you are!)
Authorized Devices with a limit is a better choice
Reminds me of something similar that happened in Canada. Satellite boxes were so easy to hack it was more of configuration, cable provider sued for disloyal competition.
That's the first time I've seen someone accuse the satellite providers of tolerating signal piracy. It wasn't THAT easy. The difficulty was in the range of a firmware flash.
It wasn't super reliable either. They used to change / fix things and people with the pirate boxes would end up waiting days or even weeks for the new hack. I can't remember the name of the content protection systems, but IIRC it was an issue / limitation with the actual satellite(s), so it's not like they could flip a switch and fix it. They made huge improvements with the next set of satellites that were put into service.
There was a very brief golden age of satellite piracy when all the FTA stuff was popular, but it didn't last any longer than you'd expect when you consider the logistics of having to deal with a satellite that's in space as one side of the system.
Google Voice numbers are cheap. If SMS is the only barrier to verifying and they don’t block it, could be easy to circumvent.
But then again, this and every other technical “solution” to this problem presented here (piracy, etc) is far beyond what a normal user could be bothered to implement.
I get it. Business team needs to see an upward trend in account sign ups and they’re seeing a plateau. This move will get the normal users legitimized and it will delay a bigger increase in cost for a year or two.
This might be the right time to dust off the pirate hats. I share my account with my family and my girlfriend and there is no way they would all subscribe to a new account.
I think it’s fair if they stop the account sharing.
But I think it will have the opposite effect. I have a friend who shared his account with me sometime back and out of courtesy I got Hulu and shared it with him.
I watch Netflix maybe an hour a month, and I can’t even remember the last time I watched Hulu.
If they put an end to sharing, it is very unlikely that I will get my own account. And will stop paying for Hulu too.
But on the other hand, I doubt if they care much about such low usage accounts.
The way I see it, the system currently works pretty well. Account sharing isn't totally free for the user.... you only can have a certain number of simultaneous streams, and you will have extra profiles on your account.
If people can afford their own account without sharing, they will do it. If they are sharing an account, it means they are sacrificing some functionality to save money.
I have a group of friends who share a Netflix login and split the bill.
It took them several months to realize there was a simultaneous streaming limitation because it was so rare for 3 of them to try to watch at the same time.
When they hit it, the third person just watches on their shared Hulu or shared HBO account anyway.
Yeah, I thought the whole point of simultaneous stream limiting was to account for this and keep costs per account low so as to remain profitable, but I guess some egg head bean counter is hell bent on earning his boss a bonus for additional cost cutting.
I struggle to see Netflix existing in its current form in 5 years. Their content is just awful, and the continuous price hikes just aren't justified. If they also start cracking down on shared accounts, I can only see it hastening their demise.
Huh? Their content is far better than any of their competitors. I have no idea what you're talking about. They've been pumping out amazing original series and movies.
Going to have to respectfully disagree. There's no accounting for taste, but I haven't made it through a full episode of a Netflix original since House of Cards, barring series they bought and labeled originals. I consider their original content very bottom of the barrel.
Yes, very fair statement. I don't think they were really under strong competitive pressure until somewhat recently though. You can get away with quite a lot when you're the only game in town. Less so when Disney are your competition.
As part of a single person household it feels weird that there is a norm that you are allowed to share logins "within your household". Effectively this means people in the same household are paying a lower price than others - so people living in single households are effectively subsidizing that usage by paying more per person.
Do you expect my wife to turn away from the TV when I am watching Netflix?
Each tier has a number of simultaneous streams allowed. If you want multiple people to be able to stream at once you pay more, and if you are streaming one at a time on the same device, you really think each person should have their own account?
> Do you expect my wife to turn away from the TV when I am watching Netflix?
No, and I do not expect my friends to turn away when they are visiting my home. This is not at all what I said or meant, and I think you know that.
> Each tier has a number of simultaneous streams allowed. If you want multiple people to be able to stream at once you pay more, and if you are streaming one at a time on the same device, you really think each person should have their own account?
There are really two things here. Yes, I am aware Netflix has a model where you can pay to have multiple streams ongoing at the same time. That's the model I am questioning, because obviously one person can only watch one stream, so this can only be used by different people in a household.
As for the other part of your question, yes, that is exactly what I think. Each person should pay equally for their own account. Why am I allowed to share my 2 streams with a partner in the next room, but not with a partner in Australia? What is the difference between the two?
One, they know it is unlikely a family would pay for more than one account while living in the same house, but they might get a few extra bucks for the family upgrading to a multiple streams subscription.
Two, they probably have data that a shared account in the same house does less simultaneous streaming on average than a shared account in multiple houses.
Not sure why you are using such a condescending tone, but I do understand how rent and the costs of living work.
The difference is that if I brought another person into my home then yes, we could split the rent, but it would also halve the amount of living space per person.
You mean like internet access, telephone and cable tv?
Single and multi person households both have pros and cons and this is just a pro for multi person households.
The con is you need a more expensive netflix plan or you can't just watch when you want to.
For products with a flat rate, the people who use it less are subsidizing it for people who use it more too. Would you say there is a problem with that?
I share my account with my dad, who does not live with me. He's been self-isolating for almost a full year and has redefined 'binge-watching' to a whole new level.
I rarely watch Netflix since it seems mostly series stretched across multiple episodes despite having a story that wouldn't justify a comic strip.
So, yes, I am subsidising him consuming stuff that Netflix would have to pay me to watch.
It's obviously not something that is going to happen, but it's also not that crazy of an idea. They use more water so you pay for more water. They use more clothing so you pay for more clothing. They use more cellular devices so you pay for more cellular connections. They each want an email address so you pay for more email accounts. They use more digital content so you pay for more digital content.
I wouldn't put it like that. I would say that each user using Netflix should pay the same amount. So you pay for yourself, your wife pays for herself, and your kid pays for themselves.
Sure, it's 3 times more than what you pay today. But you are 3 times as many people as I am, so why shouldn't you?
And three roommates splitting rent pay less than the person who lives in a three bedroom apartment alone.
If it really bothers you, get a few people to pay you a few bucks to be included in your "household" and use your netflix account with you the same way that apartment owner sublets the extra rooms.
>If it really bothers you, get a few people to pay you a few bucks to be included in your "household" and use your netflix account with you the same way that apartment owner sublets the extra rooms.
But I can't do that - this is exactly what the article is saying Netflix is now starting to take action against, and it is already against their TOS.
Me, Mom, Dad, Grandparents, GF, GFs Mom.
Other than myself and my GF, most of the people on this list watch something on Netflix every couple of months, when I or someone/something else recommend them a movie or show.
I don't want them to use my profile, because we then obviously can't watch the same things, and it'll break my recommendations. I get why Netflix wants to split up accounts. Currently, they get approximately $240 per year from me and my family. If everyone has to create their own account, that number goes up to $1200.
But that's how my family lives. Parents are separated, grandparents live in their own house, my gf at home with her mom and I alone.
My dad in turn pays Disney+ for me, Spotify is paid by my GFs mother, grandma cooks me a couple of Lasagnas every year. We just share these services.
Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
In the end, these streaming platforms are probably right that you shouldn't be allowed to share accounts if you don't live under the same roof, but it still kinda pisses me off.
Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...