Your logic seems to conclude that you keep paying for Netflix, but that your mom will be the only one to use it.

Yes, that is the last paying option left. Obviously, that's not appealing though, so I'm more likely to seek out alternatives.

I think the subtext is: you don't have a problem. You have a single-household Netflix account. You're the kind of account Netflix likes.

I'm not sure I agree. If the choices are:

I can keep my account and downgrade my plan and then pay for a separate account for my Mom, then they would make about the same or even less money. They certainly won't be getting any ad revenue from either account.

I can cancel my account outright and get my content through alternative methods where Netflix is not compensated.

It seems to me the choice is obvious here and the calculus doesn't swing in Netflix's favor. Perhaps for the majority of the subscriber population it will, but that's a bit of a gamble when my generation and really every other generation after grew up knowing how to pirate whatever they wanted.

If your mom is the only user, what is the difference to you?

She's not the _only_ user, it's just that my "households" usage doesn't justify the expense and effort.

And the other subtext is: paying for an account that's usable only in the other single-household is unattractive enough to seek alternatives instead of keeping the subscription.

The difference is that there's no reason to keep the expensive 4k account.

The Premium plan is 4k streaming, and up to 4 devices. But now they want to keep those two features bundled, while limiting your ability to stream to 4 devices (because now they'll all need to be in the same house). Sharing my account was my reason to suck that up and pay 20 bucks a month for 4k streaming.

Now only I can watch it, or in OP comment's case only his mom can watch it, so there's no reason to not just switch to the basic plan with 720p for 10 bucks a month. Point is, there will be cancellations, but also a ton of people halving their subscription cost. It's going to hurt Netflix on both ends.

It will just be cancellations. No one is going to 720p. Not sure how you could think that.

There are more than just cancellations and downgrades to consider. Netflix will make money from people who pay for their own accounts and from their new revenue stream of ads. There's also a very noticeable image quality difference between 4k and 720p, so there's no reason to assume the basic plan is what everyone will downgrade to like yourself.

I'm in a similar situation with my mother-in-law. I'd happily pay a bit more each month to support her Netflix account. If they block her, we may just cancel the subscription completely.

So your thesis is that piracy is cheaper. Ok thanks.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Gabe Newell, 10+ years ago

Once upon a time, Netflix itself was considered the case in point! Then video streaming splintered into a dozen services and now Netflix has decided to make things even more complicated. People don't learn, I guess.

I think that's a bit unfair. Businesses go through business cycles. I never worked there, nor have insight (obviously) but you know the business climate changes, your competitors change and you have to adjust or experience consequences. Sometimes you need to grow subscriptions, sometimes you need to grow revenue, sometimes you have more flexibility, and sometimes less (Netflix has to re-enter agreements with content owners and creators and those can change and they have to adjust and also business changes). However, it seems people only envision greedy accountants and Executives rubbing hands at the prospect.

Once you go public you have no option other than to just grow at all costs. The cost of Netflix pushing growth is turning consumer sentiment against them by cracking down on account sharing and pushing ads into the service. Netflix had a gross profit of $12.44B in 2022. Why not preserve the large, successful business that consumers have a high opinion of instead of push for further profits?

The truth is that Netflix could continue profiting billions per year more or less indefinitely without risking the company by shifting focus from growth, and the only people who would be upset about it would be shareholders. And the only reason they'd be upset is because of greed. They could stop trying to grow and be a strong dividend company overnight.

It's not that simple. Their "greed" affords "those" investors the ability to invest those earnings in other up and comers --some of which may fail and some of which may succeed. If everyone was just happy with going an even course, at scale, the economy would stagnate.

The stagnated economy means lots of popular services that consistently pull in large profits, and are well like by consumers, and which are careful not to screw over their users at every opportunity I'd be just fine with that.

> Once you go public you have no option other than to just grow at all costs.

Nothing grows forever, so in fact this "grow at all costs" mentality forces many otherwise healthy companies that could maintain a nice break-even with some dividend to pay into doing stupid short-term thinking and desperate financial engineering and then in time collapse and go into bankruptcy.

Sure, here's a typical business cycle these days:

> First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

"Tiktok's enshittification", by Cory Doctorow

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The problem for Netflix is that they can't really negotiate rates. Netflix as a business makes sense only when most of what one wants is available. At this point, all they can do is increase rates, lose subs and make as much money on the decline as possible.

> "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem." - Gabe Newell, 10+ years ago

Yet nearly everyone complaining here today about Netflix is complaining about the price.

The additional context needed is how fragmented the content library has become. Netflix has so much less popular content compared to 10 years ago.

Still just complaining about price. It is trivial to search the content you want to watch, and pay for it.

A couple extra taps is not sufficient friction to claim that “service” is the problem.

It's significantly more than "a couple extra taps".

There's mental overhead from having multiple services, as well as the price.

At some point you just decide it's not worth the hassle.

Sure, but 20 years ago, you had to go to a physical store, rent or buy physical media, put it into a physical device, and then play it.

Or call up a cable or satellite TV company and had to have equipment installed and pay equipment rental fees, and watch whatever was on without any control.

It is, objectively, pretty easy and convenient to watch what you want, when you want (assuming you are in the right jurisdiction). The only question remains is, are you willing to pay the amount the seller asks?

>It is, objectively, pretty easy and convenient to watch what you want, when you want

Sure, between Netflix, HBO, Disney, Paramount, etc, etc, etc... all with their own "exclusives".

So to watch what you want, when you want, you would need to pay multiple monthly fees and deal with the aforementioned mental overhead of multiple subscriptions to manage.

At least in the old video store days, one only had to go to a single video store.

Now they're even differentiating by the quality of the stream. That's more consumer-hostile arbitrary garbage that the video store never had. Who in their right mind would pay for blurry SD streaming nowadays, when even phones are 4k? But of course there's no single HD stream plan available.

Piracy is unfortunately relatively easier and more convenient, and that's a failure of the entertainment industry. Not to mention the terrible quality of the average show... and the fact that shows that you've "purchased" go missing from streaming sites randomly... and now they're putting ads in there. The downward spiral is now.

Yes but I think you have it backwards. My seedbox is (significantly) more expensive than a Netflix subscription. But it works splendidly: nothing disappears from its catalogue; there no missing episodes; I can use it from any IP, household, or continent I want; requires no DRM; serves exactly the format I pick.

People who chose Netflix decided to opt for an inferior service that was cheaper and required less effort. Now Netflix is reneging on the deal. Their customers will have to pay more and manage multiple accounts.

Of course people are complaining when you're trying to charge gourmet prices for McDonald's.

Not really, although they've been raising their prices like crazy while offering less and less while increasing the number of ads (even for ad free plans). They are degrading their service. I'm paying for access to netflix on a certain number of screens. It makes zero difference where those screens are located. I'm not located in the same place myself, but now I'm expected to be constantly inconvenienced with "verification" nags.

The price of the service isn't the problem, which is why everyone I know has a netflix account (we'll see how long that stays true) it's the cost of what they're turning the service into while charging more and more that's the problem.

I wouldn't mind the price if the billions they pour into producing and buying content led to something I actually want to watch. Anything. If it's there, their algorithm failed to surface it in favor of showing the same 20 things I wasn't interested in the last 100 times I opened the app.

The anti-artists love to suggest that this is true, but all payment includes some kind of speed bump. Are shoplifters not thieves, but merely protesters against the drag of waiting for a checkout lane? Are rapists just men who are experiencing a "service problem" from women? Pretty much every crime can be rationalized with this pro-privacy cant.

If you want artists in this world, you must support them. If you don't, be honest and don't complain about service.

I have subscribed to eight different streaming services for movies, music, audiobooks and books, and I have a large game library in Steam and Epic. I still prefer to use pirated copies of the same things that I can access legitimately through these subscriptions; they just provide a vastly superior experience.

Games are much better in pirate releases where you are not riddled with bullshit launchers and online "services". Music, Audiobooks and Movie rips shared on the high seas are of much superior quality and high-efficiency encodings than those provided by Netflix and Spotify. And don't even get me started on Book DRMs. Not to mention the things you paid for can be taken away without consequence at any time in these services. So keep your "anti-artist" rhetoric to yourself, most of those scared of piracy are often just scared of losing out on their cheap income in fears that more people will realise the actual quality of the "art" before buying than they would have.

Leaving aside your ridiculous comparison between rape and filesharing, artists existed long before netflix and other subscription services.

A lot of art was created without financial incentive.

In fact, financial incentive ruins art in a lot of ways.

It wasn't necessarily cheaper in terms of effort until now and I prefer to support the content creators. But I already pay over $20/month and for what? I barely use it, same with my Wife. The one person that does use it the most is getting blocked, so I have a hard time seeing a reasonable alternative.

Their thesis is that he isnt using more concurrent streams that he is paying for and if the company wants to start putting additional limitations on this concurrent streams, its not worth the headache anymore.

Plex isn't necessarily piracy.

I upvoted this because it's technically true, but common "legal" use-cases involve format shifting and that puts you out of bounds straight away, depending on your jurisdiction.

Even if your area allows it for "backups" or interop, you're making it available in multiple locations at once. I'm sure it wouldn't take much to demonstrate this was some sort of performance or other act explicitly disallowed by the EULA. But I'm sure you're just sharing Big Buck Bunny ;)

My point isn't that it's illegal, only that it's disingenuous enough to suggest it is legal. Plex definitely lies in a grey area of tolerated home use, with features that turn it into a piracy nightmare.

Couldn't the same be said about allowing others to use your Netflex account? I think Netflix is licensing you access to their library, and not that friend who uses your account.

Yes, that's exactly the argument Rightsholder groups in the UK are making. They claim it's piracy, the same as if you downloaded it yourself.

Using Plex and downloading movies for personal use is legal in some countries like Switzerland.

Goodwill was the only argument they had. Burning that up seems like a great way to kill what income streams they had.

Yeah it was less convenient and now it will be more convenient.

Same situation here. I think I'll just cancel, put the subscription money I save into a fund to maintain and upgrade my home server.

I'm not you so I don't know your situation but the thought of having to manually download and share media whenever my mom calls me up sounds miserable. I'd rather just pay for her subscription.

My system is 100% automated. Sonarr + Radarr + Prowlarr + Deluge + SABnzdb FTW.

I stuck to using torrents for years but about 6 months ago I switched to Usenet and the $10 p/m for the Usenet provider and $30/year for an indexer is definitely worth the money. Now instead of having hundreds of seedless torrents in my queue, my system downloads even the most obscure media at a speed that completely saturates my connection.

First rule of usenet! do you want it to end up like zlib?

I always had back luck finding odler stuff, am I just doing it wrong then?

Torrents tend to stay somewhat alive way longer.

I miss the glory days of rapidshare, fastupload, rapidleech, megaupload ...

Which Usenet provider are you using? I used Giganews back in the day and I see they are still operational. Thanks.

What indexer(s) do you use?

Manually? There's out of the box ways to automate essentially everything including new requests

There's a lot of things I'd want to address beyond the tech: I'd want the videos to have good subtitles, to actually be what was requested and not have surprise porn or whatever, for examples. I don't think these are things I could automate. Netflix is likely to include subtitles and will never return video that wasn't requested. I dunno, it's work the few bucks a month.

Streaming services including Netflix regularly omit subtitles for non-english dialogue, I've found. For a significant number of movies this this can make them unwatchable.

This is easily automated using Ombi and the other tools folks have mentioned in other comments.

Same. I share a netflix account with my parents.

Thankfully I've already introduced them to Emby (similar to plex/jellyfin), and they are already familiar with the app that I installed on their Android tv box. They've been using it more than Netflix over the past few months, as the current show they are watching

Cancelling Netflix will be a very small disruption for us.

My divorced buddy shares his account with his son, who lives in the next city over with his ex-wife. Cracking down on them will result in one less subscriber, not more money.

I'm angry about their offering. I'm fine with Netflix for me only, but I want the full quality.

If they force me to either pay for an entire family without being able to share it with my mom or to stream the content in subpar quality I will probably just go elsewhere.