That's the case for me indeed. I myself basically stopped watching Netflix, somehow the content doesn't do anything for me anymore.
But I shared my account with family and they watch it. If this gets to us, and I'm the only one who can watch it, I'm for sure cancelling. The family members with whom I'm sharing the account are very unlikely to get their own account either.
They don't even seem to be bothering to create great content like Stranger Things anymore. We are at the enshittification of Netflix stage.
Now they do 7 episodes and call it a season and frequently their shows only have one or two seasons.
BBC's QI is one example. I understand new series not being available on Netflix (in the UK) as the BBC now have their own subscription platform. But it's not just that, because Netflix don't have the earliest ones either, just a seemingly random set in the middle, perhaps even non-contiguous.
Buy what you can when you can afford it. It seems like good business strategy?
These days that’s even more of a plus. When someone recommends something to watch the first thing I check is how many seasons it’s up to, then the number of episodes, then the runtime. Shows with too many seasons of too many too long episodes are immediately ignored.
Expensive is a word accounting, finance and investors really don’t like.
I stopped even considering Netflix shows with only one or two seasons because they almost always get killed mid-story. Which means I pretty much never watch Netflix now. Out of state relatives using the account is the main thing keeping me subscribed, so when that sharing gets cut off it'll be the end of my subscription.
Let's say you aren't alone in your subscription situation, to put it mildly.
In short, without quality, there is no choice.
None of us are interested in the kind of content they are pushing anymore.
The drop in the stock price was expected news for everyone familiar with the service, at least in my circle.
That's why your average nigh-unreadable dogpoo novel off the bargain bin has writing on par with an excellent TV show or movie
What I like best about HBO is that they have an A-Z listing of every show they have (something people have been asking Netflix for since day one of their streaming service) and how peaceful it is to use their platform.
You can browse without anything auto-playing, you can pause a show for more than 3 seconds and ads don't start rapidly flashing on the screen, and shows don't immediately jump to more ads after credits start rolling so you can actually let an ending sink in without having to scramble for your remote.
I also really like their "last chance" section because things are leaving all the time and that gives you some warning.
HBO max is just much nicer to use than netflix.
> You can browse without anything auto-playing
What? Has this changed recently? I mainly use their AppleTV app, and sometimes their web app. With the AppleTV app, there are a bunch of thumbnails that look like DVD covers. When you swipe over to one of them, at first nothing happens, but just as you're about to move to the next one, the one you're on expands shoving everything to right off the screen. Moving one-to-the-right, then causes everything to collapse down again for a second, until the newly selected thing suddenly expands for no reason. It's incredibly spastic and makes it very hard to get to a specific item.
I could have sworn it auto-played a preview, too, but I might be misremembering that.
If that's changed recently (I haven't browsed the app since "The Last of Us" ended), then great! But using it for the past year or two has been a non-starter. I just look up their shows in the search section of the AppleTV and add them to my Up Next queue so I can avoid interacting with their app at all costs.
Hulu and Netflix seem to not be so painful to use. AppleTV+ used to be perfect but a recent update made it equally unusable. I set the Home Row on my AppleTV to be my "Up Next" queue, and now only interact with the TV app from the home screen. It has less functionality that way, but it also has none of the suckage.
Even when you're using the same device they A/B test on us. Netflix recently introduced a weird sound effect as their main ad loads (it plays after their usual intro sound effect) but other's I've spoken to hadn't heard it.
I searched for Dracula, got documentaries about nazis.
The value proposition isn't there for me, I'm just being nice to my mom.
Definitely the case for me. I am able to help out 10-20 family members across 4 countries, and all I have to do is pay a measly $17.99/mo. If that goes away, I will be cancelling my subscription.
I think Netflix (and others) are looking at that 10-20 x $18/month and salivating, not realizing that the money just isn't there. They need to take a page from the Microsoft book and let people "steal" some of the content so they can have a least some paying customers. It beats having no paying customers.
Today, who would waste time pirating music instead of paying for a streaming service?
[0] https://piratebayproxy.info/setup.html
[1] https://apibay.org It has no public-facing site, probably to keep it off the radar.
[2] https://piratebayproxy.info/ is what I use.
You're sharing an account with 20 people across 4 countries? It's honestly kind of amazing that they let this level of sharing go on for so long.
It's hard for me to believe that out of 20 different people, every single one of them would decide to boycott Netflix forever because of this. If even 1 of those people decides to re-subscribe, Netflix has lost nothing. If 2 or more subscribe, they win.
Extrapolate this across their userbase and it's not hard to see why they're doing it. Obviously some people will cancel, but I guarantee Netflix has run pilot trials and analyzed the net effect to their bottom line.
While extrapolating over a large dataset, it's important to get the initial numbers as correct as possible. Since the person you're replying to is paying for the most expensive plan (probably to get the 4x devices-at-a-time perk for so many people), the plan those people would re-subscribe at is important (and less likely to be the same plan if only for one person).
They'd need at least 3 people to re-subscribe on either of the two cheapest plans to net a profit, or they'd need at least 2 people to re-subscribe on the "Standard" $16/mo plan to net a profit. Anything less is a net negative. It's a favorably-biased population for Netflix, but that'd still require a 15%-30% conversion rate for users.
I'm sure they'll come ahead in the end, but I imagine a high % of the expected profit comes from cutting costs from serving 20x "free" users per plan rather than converting them into paying users themselves.
They are obligated by law to create this content
See: https://www.innovationmcc.com/post/spain-will-now-protect-it...
> "Towards the end of 2018, European Parliament approved a law that requires all platforms that provide audiovisual content throughout the continent to have at least 30% European productions within their programming."
Edit: formatting
In other words: no different than almost all efforts of the EU to "regulate the market" instead of creating incentives.
My family is in the process of finding the best suitable and possible emigration target. Unfortunately this is common. The hardest problem are family ties and care of our parents :/
If your downvoting because of derailing the thread, I deserve it, go on. I'm just frustrated how the EU is, at least from the perspective of my bubble, losing almost every game it wants to play.
For me the European content has been the fun part and much more exciting than boring low effort shows like Chicago $THING.
The two last shows I actually enjoyed on Netflix were both french (a very secret service, and call my agent)
The mistake Netflix makes is to assume that the families and friends, who have been using a shared login, will signup for a subscription on their own. They won't, the value proposition isn't there anymore and these are people who didn't want to pay for the subscription to begin with.
I have serious doubts about Netflix calculations on this decision, but I also don't see what else they could do. They can't buy the content people want and they struggle to produce high quality movies and shows. Their productions are beautiful, but the scripts are severely lacking. Sometimes they get lucky and do a good season of a show, only to screw up subsequent seasons.
Or cancel really good shows like The OA or Mindhunter...
But in reality they end up losing the 1 account instead because none of the 3 people are willing to pay full price individually. They were all willing to pay 1/3 of the price when sharing.
They've initialized this crackdown in a few different waves. I can't imagine they would continue to do it if it were detrimental to their bottom line.
Companies regularly do things that are detrimental to their bottom line because they either misunderstood how their customers use their product, or because they are trying to please shareholders, or a combination of both.
The question begging to be asked here is whether those are new subscribers or people that were using someone's else password, natural growth, or just a good show landed in meantime and a bunch of people subscribed
It's an increasingly crowded market, everyone's distracted, everyone's sick of subscriptions, and nobody has enough money. If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.
It does seem like this was a plan that was in the works for a couple years, and momentum is keeping it moving. I doubt they would have picked this timing if they knew what was coming!
They had noted they saw or expected the users who were on someone else's account and who used it actively to come back with their own accounts or convince the account holder to pay for them
I did more of a write up based on what they are shared in their earnings here: https://upollo.ai/blog/learning-from-netflixs-earnings
> Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar’s research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter.
So they lost 300,000 paying users whom they think will come back, but 10% of existing users plan on leaving despite Netflix investing in Spanish content.
I think the issue is that people who are paying for an account they are sharing are likely to keep the account active so their family members can continue watching, even if they are also using a competitor. When the family are cut off, they cancel.