this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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You are overestimating how much we're willing to think or talk about this. It may be a cultural thing or a socioeconomic thing, but with media subs being a thing for decades there's a blob of people where some have each other's subs, different people are paying for different subs and there are different shares and accesses floating around. Some of the subs come from cable bundles, even.
I'm pretty sure in the extended friends and family group there are multiple bundled subs for some of the same services, some of which may not even be in use because devices are grandfathered into the first one that got acquired.
We really aren't putting that much collective attention into this problem. People just watch what they have. When a show isn't in a service the group has access to it just gets ignored. I'm easily the most engaged in the whole thing and even I don't care that much. So that explains why I'd be making decisions about which tier of Netflix is being paid. I am the one who has paid access to that one, and I'm the one engaged enough to have an opinion. At one point I told the group that Netflix had hiked prices and I had downgraded to the 1080p tier with two screens, in case we hit the screen limit or the location restrictions. Everybody just shrugged, said "eff Netflix" and moved on with their lives. We've never hit the limits or been flagged for password sharing.
I'm aware of how media subs work and pw sharing works. But for me, I pay for the subscriptions I want access to. If pw sharing gets cut off, that is a free gift I used to give to other people as a bonus, but it doesn't impact how I chose which subs I pay for to access the content I watch. That's why I am curious why the primary sub holder of a service would cancel a sub if there's a PW share crackdown if they are the sole person paying for it and it's a subscription they enjoy utilizing.
Again, you're looking at it wrong. Or weird, at least. It's like asking why I'd be mad that the brand of cookies a member of my family eats gets a price hike if I don't like them myself. They're still in my shopping cart every week.
I don't have a concept of a "primary sub holder". It's stuff a group of people gets for the group, and who is paying for which specific parts of the fixed expenses is lost to the mists of time.
I get that US and anglo cultures in general are less collectivist, but this seems more extreme than that. Surely the concept of a close-knit group of people sharing costs without much precise bookkeeping is not completely alien to you. Do you split grocery shopping with the rest of your household? I mean, I did that when I was sharing an apartment during university, so maybe it's an age thing?
I am aware of close knit families. But when one family member had cable, we'd just have movie/game/tv watch party with the extended family. Sure, if anyone wanted to have it in their own home independent of the social viewing experience, you could always buy it for your household. And the family members that had the cable package, probably would have kept it even if we didn't come over to visit and watch a game on ESPN or some other cable TV. PW sharing is fine within the household. It's when it 's out of the household where the crackdown really happens.
Hey, I wasn't the one who switched the system to a username and passwod authorization. My "household" isn't defined by the physical location anymore than their account system is. Friends and family groups don't work however Netflix wants them to work for monetization purposes. There are blood relations who don't sleep under the same roof but hang out daily. There are friend groups that share a roof. There are couples who spend weeks at a time apart but still live together.
It's not my fault that Netflix borked the business model and then tried to walk it back once it lured everybody else to a profit dark hole. I'm not gonna change how my social relationships work for the sake of them having a neat revenue stream with no gray areas.
So no, PW sharing is fine, period, that's what concurrent screen limits are for. What constitutes a "household" is not for Netflix to define, and I have a social group where some expenses just float around in limbo without a clear attribution or distinction between payers and users. Welcome to existing in real life and having zero time to worry about enshittified late captialist terminally online bullshit, honestly.
Netflix was always a physical household concept business model. They started by mailing DVDs to a physical address. I think the challenge has been around the technology to enforce that on the digital end where the devices allow portability of service via digital distribution and resolution of IP or other identifiers to household is not always deterministic. Netflix does get to define what household means in their terms of service for their business agreement with the customer.
No, it wasn't. They were VERY glad to suggest that password sharing was a feature, not a bug, while they were trying to drive cable TV out of business and establish a leadership position against other streaming services. They also allow you to watch on multiple screens, download files to watch offline on the go and, crucially, actively provide discounted accounts to watch on multiple locations even after reneging on the promises they made during the user acquisition stage. Nothing they do is consistent with the service being tied to households instead of accounts except trying to charge you extra for it. Hey, I know that tech start ups will eventually try to pee on me, but don't come here to tell me it's raining.
So I say again, Netflix doesn't get to arbitrarily limit tech and back out of features just because they engaged in a suicidal business model in the pursuit of endless growth, and they don't get to redefine my social relationships for me. I am the client here, and I get to say when their offer has enshittified enough that I no longer want it.
For now, I don't want their overpriced premium tier anymore. It's back to UHD BR for me if I want something to look shiny. And the moment they try to enforce their dumb password sharing rule I'm out entirely. I feel zero remorse or sense that I'm taking advantage of them for this. If anything, they are the ones "breaking things", so they have the responsibility to fix them.
I don't know that one cheeky tweet from their pr/marketing team mens they gladly advertised password sharing as a feature. Would need to go back to the TOS for subs back then. Multiple screens is one thing, but multiple households is another.
I've mooched off my parent's cable account for 10+ years for streaming well after I moved to another state. As services cracked down on the practice I personally have never felt entitled to the TV services my household was not paying for. Some I chose to pay for myself, others I realize aren't for me and don't subscribe. Forl Netflix, I haven't yet broached the subject of joining accounts and paying for the additional logins option, but maybe I'll do that as a cost saving measure. But I can't think of a moral justification for why my household should be entitled to a TV service my parents pay for hundreds of miles away from where I live.
When CEOs talked about password sharing it was under the marketing POV that those folks would eventually convert into subscribers naturally. I guess they didn't expect it to become the norm. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/11/netflix-ceo-says-account-sharing-is-ok/
Well, tough luck. Should have been better at their jobs, then. They sure make enough money to expect them to be.
It's not just the marketing, though, it's the non-enforcement. "Cracking down" is only a thing if you weren't cracking down before. If you allow the practice and then you don't, you've downgraded the service.
Now, if capitalism didn't suck and technocapitalism wasn't fundamentally broken, the way this would work is you'd pay per screen and it wouldn't matter where or when those screens are used. After all, the service itself has costs related to buying media, storing media and sending media over the Internet. One screen is one data stream is one payment stream. Makes sense.
But that's not the idea. That was never the idea. The idea of tech start ups is that they'll disrupt an old established business by losing money on purpose to grow very fast to a position of quasi-monopoly, then squeeze the newly captive audience for as much as possible. That's what Netflix was trying to do, we're all adults here, it's not a secret.
What I'm saying is my fuse is super short on that one and I won't play that game for too long. Which is why I'm here instead of Reddit, in Mastodon instead of Twitter and in the process of buying a bunch of 4K Blu Rays. I'm not gonna tell people how to live their lives, but I'd argue that both Netflix and the Internet at large would suck much less if I wasn't in a very slim minority.