This line of thinking leads to the ludicrous existing patents that describe scanning the room to check how many people are in a room and once crossed a certain threshold, the movie or show automatically stops airing.
Oh you better believe that if this was possible to do with physical books, it would be done.
The only reason this isn't much of a thing with ebooks is that if you use the bigger ebook services you don't really own the books in the first place.
If you are paid member of a library, and the library has ToS which does not allow you to lend your book to anyone else, then yes you are at fault when you share.
There are limits even there.
Does any of those services have "multiple simultaneous streams" plans? I'm paying Netflix for 4 simultaneous streams (their naming: "Number of screens you can watch on at the same time") and they should not care where I utilize their offer.
You’re too fixated on this stream limit. It’s not the only limit of the contract, even if you wish that was the case.
Rather than paying for the whole year I’ll pay for a month or two like I do with paramount+ and Disney+.
I’m sure they did some financial calculus to see what’s better but it’s not like other companies haven’t made terrible decisions in the past killing their business. I’m sure blockbuster had bean counters justifying their choices too.
Customers aren't reacting because it hasn't happened yet outside of a few tiny test countries.
Excluding no longer being able to do business in Russia for sanctions purposes, Netflix gained subscribers rather than losing them last quarter.
4 streams simultaneously could all be from different locations, even different countries and still be a household subscription.
One watches at work, another family member is on holidays abroad, the other watches at home and the other via mobile Internet on a train. Should this considered password sharing?
You. Not your neighbor. Not your friends.
Strictly by the sentence you quote to make your point, you would not even be allowed to share your "simultaneous streams" with members of your household. Which makes this quote rather useless to argue for your assumed right of sharing your streams with anyone you want.
If you bought a sort of “family pass” to a movie theater that allowed your family to watch unlimited movies, you wouldn’t expect to be able to pass the family pass around to other families.
Netflix is literally just the digital version of a family pass to a movie theater. Everything is priced according to models of single households using single accounts, down to the licensing costs and royalties.
Not to mention some families are fairly distributed and any tech savvy person has many viable alternatives.
I also see how this is hard to make fair for edge cases; it should just be clear what it means. I think 1 geo location at a time for x screens is clear. One household is not clear; if my wife is travelling for her job and my son too while I stay at home: how does that work? Are they going to time the ‘remote’ watching for what a typical vacation or work outing might look like?
Anyway; instead of clamping down on password sharing, why not add tiers based on number of geo locations with those screens? 4 screens in 2 locations, 4 screens in 3 locations, 4 screens in 4 locations and that’s it. These locations are not fixed, but this is easy to measure and enforce for them, while, as my situation above, is less obvious.
I think making it clear what is allowed and what is not from the start in verifiable terms, is important or users will get angry as they seem to be now.
I think they will gain a lot of members that way too, since people get used and attached to a service and now need their own accounts.
Netflix's problem was to cut quality to control costs _before_ they raised prices. If they had raised these prices while they were still the ascendant service I'm sure you are right and people would have grumbled while ultimately signing up. Then they could have cut costs slowly and most of their customers would not have noticed the boiling of the frog. As it stands they are driving their customers away at the exact moment that their competitors have finally gotten their house in order and opened their arms to Netflix's client base.
Like look at just AppleTV and HBOMax. AppleTV is dumping a massive amount of money into the aesthetics. Even the screensaver on the machine is this beautiful 4k resolution photos of landscapes, all while they are obviously not skimping on writes. HBO has been in the quality tv space for longer than Netflix has produced content _and_ has paired with Adult Swim(a channel that is unique enough in content to drive people to pay for packages just to get it, much like sports in the past) to get all their content. Both of these are cheaper than what Netflix is proposing as their monthly costs.
I'm not sure why Netflix thinks people will accept a more expensive, and worse product in the face of this competition
Does nobody here pay tax? Household has a pretty clear meaning, people ordinarily resident overnight in the same household.
Spotify has the same restriction, and uses ML to enforce it to some extent, and nobody using the service legitimately has any issues.
this applies to literally no service you have ever used. doesn't apply to steam. doesn't apply to microsoft office. doesn't apply to photoshop. why should it apply to netflix?
using your logic we might as well just have 1 account and share it with every single person on the planet.
the only reason that netflix is getting flack for it is because they were super lax with it for such a long time and now everyone feels entitled to it for some insane reason.