Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is here – it costs $7.99 per month (USA)

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/23/23734725/netflix-password-sharing-us-pricing-streaming

by edsimpson • 3 years ago

38 47 3 years ago

edsimpson• 3 years ago

What happens to students? If you're on your parents' plan but not physically in their "household"?

bombcar• 3 years ago

I suspect students are considered part of the "household" because they are for tax and healthcare purposes. But who is going to sue to establish that?

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

1. "household" is not a general legal term.

2. Dependent is different from household.

leros• 3 years ago

From previous information I've seen, they'd have to physically go home once a month and use Netflix on their device there. Otherwise that device will get flagged.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

You can add extra users to your account and who aren't living with you: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/123277#:~:text=The%20accoun....

propogandist• 3 years ago

The account owner will need to purchase an extra member slot

Lol, no thanks.

Great time to buy puts for next earnings.

remote_phone• 3 years ago

As soon as I get this email I’m going to cancel Netflix and start pirating anything I want to watch, which frankly isn’t very much on Netflix anymore.

alyandon• 3 years ago

Yep, I'm divorced and my minor son goes back and forth between his mother's house and mine on a weekly basis. I have a NF subscription and he is signed into my NF account over there on his xbox and the moment NF tries to extort additional money from me is the moment I cancel my subscription.

m4jor• 3 years ago

Just throw Plex onto a spare computer, NAS, or something like an rPi4.

I have 600 movies on my Plex setup and 10ish TV shows w multiple seasons.

I aint ever paying for Netflix/HBO/Apple TV/etc.

Come to the dark side

magic_hamster• 3 years ago

Time will tell if this is the right move. Personally I can't remember the last time I watched any content that came from NF. I think the last time I even considered something on their platform was when Stranger Things season 2 was released. Maybe.

Something tells me this isn't going to go the way the would have hoped.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

Something tells me this isn't going to go the way the would have hoped.

Netflix is renowned for testing changes to the product, learning from the data, and iterating. We know that they have been testing in various markets over the last year or so.

So I'd be pretty sure that they are confident in this change.

infamouscow• 3 years ago

This is always said when a large public company does something that's:

1. controversial enough people begin drawing lines in the sand

2. increasing prices without any customer benefit

3. going against the headwinds of the economy as consumers tighten their belts

Maybe you're right, but I can't think of a single time this hasn't backfired. The Law of Unintended Consequences is a law for a reason.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

It's interesting that jumped all the way to this, instead of working down from the accounts that log in from 20 cities, 10 cities, 3 cities, 1 city, etc.

zem• 3 years ago

finished watching the good place just in time!

neither_color• 3 years ago

A tip if you travel often is to set up a wireguard tunnel to a home computer. You just need port forwarding on your router enabled. Works better than any paid VPN service for watching your local netflix and it can't be detected.

roody15• 3 years ago

Here is another tip: Don’t pay for a service that makes you jump through hoops to access its content.

jjeaff• 3 years ago

That leaves what streaming service, then?

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 3 years ago

I think this might be moot. "Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are — at home, on the go, on holiday ..."[0] suggests that they'll use some mechanism other than IP to determine that there is against-terms "password sharing" going on. Probably something like device sessions instead.

[0] https://about.netflix.com/en/news/update-on-sharing-may-us

andromeduck• 3 years ago

Probably just cooking sniffing and some sort of grace period if you're not on the same network for a while.

fakedang2• 3 years ago

Here's anotharrrr tip matey!

costanzaDynasty• 3 years ago

For many a format warrior it was an oasis. But it long since stopped being that.

JoshGlazebrook• 3 years ago

Extra members cannot be added to partner packages or third-party billed accounts.

Looks like anyone getting netflix via T-Mobile/etc are even more out of luck.

harshalizee2• 3 years ago

Nope. Sorry, Netflix. I paid for 4 concurrent streams and now you're reneging on your contract. I didn't care much when they constantly bumped the price either. Been a Netflix subscriber since 2012. I don't really watch as much, but my mother occasionally watches a movie or two a month. My brother in college binges a tv show once in a while. I know that neither of them will go out of their way to subscribe to Netflix.

wilg2• 3 years ago

I paid for 4 concurrent streams and now you're reneging on your contract.

You almost certainly in fact paid for 4 concurrent streams in the same household, and you were just out of compliance on your contract the whole time.

mikeortman• 3 years ago

That’s probably a fair statement, but I highly doubt there is a substantial audience of families that want to watch four separate shows at the same time in the same house for them to justify the research and marketing to implement.

harshalizee2• 3 years ago

Actually, they encouraged it - -https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712

mvdtnz2• 3 years ago

I'm sure Netflix will deeply miss your brother and your mother, neither of whom have ever paid for Netflix.

autoexec2• 3 years ago

I bet they missed the 1 million subscribers who canceled netflix in Spain when they pulled this shit. Maybe some people in his family weren't paying for the bill out of their own account, but the service could easily be worth the price for the value all three members of a family get out of it, but not at all worth it for just one.

Even when a family member, friend, or a romantic partner watches a netflix show on an account that they didn't personally pay for, they're still watching netflix, still talking about good shows they saw on netflix with others, still posting about things they saw on netflix online, and still providing netflix with valuable data and metrics and netflix is still making money.

takeda2• 3 years ago

I think it was relatively clear that OP is considering cancelling the entire account.

jszymborski• 3 years ago

They might miss OPs business, though

m-p-32• 3 years ago

They will when I cancel the service, acquire the content using some alternative methods and make it available to my brother and mother on my Plex server.

I mostly pay for the convenience. Make it inconvenient and I'll use my time to make it work my way.

Marsymars• 3 years ago

This is relatively easy to handle for e.g. family sharing for Apple - everyone uses the same billing method, so it's naturally limited to people where you feel comfortable covering the cost of all their Apple digital purchases.

Netflix has no such "real-world" limit to apply that naturally covers students and other dependants, so they seem stuck with various contrived options.

I feel like # of simultaneous streams really ought to have been the natural limiter. If you're allowed two streams, it doesn't make a difference in the real world whether the two streams are to the same physical house or not.

fakedang2• 3 years ago

We are invested in a company that does TV productions for regional markets, the content often being sold to the major streaming partners of that market. One of our partner's produced shows was a top 10 global Netflix production. Yet even they contend that Netflix's acceptance process is by far the most whimsical of them all. And with the recent shift to Americanization and wokification of content, it seems they are losing ground to Amazon Prime in regional markets. With these kinds of faux pas, I wonder if Amazon won't eat their lunch (and their daily bread) very soon.

chaosbutters314• 3 years ago

people complaining about no good content need to binge kotoro, revival, and sweettooth. netflix still makes some great original content

eggy• 3 years ago

I think the price is fair for the amount of content, but my family has been considering leaving Netflix to cut down on screen time and save a few bucks. I picked up YT premium, which saves me a lot of time waiting to skip ads. I wish they had this when I was a kid with the 13 VHF and 52 UHF channels in Brooklyn when I was a kid. If you buy Starbucks coffee, then Netflix is just 2 or 3 lattes a month to make up the difference! I went back to Dunkin a while ago when I don't have my thermos with me ;)

gnicholas• 3 years ago

I don't think we'll turn off NFLX indefinitely, and we probably won't pause. But this might get us to consolidate with other family members. If NFLX is blessing account-sharing, then we might take them up on the offer. Going it alone is pretty expensive.

Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is here – it costs $7.99 per month (USA)

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