> 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.

> According to Netflix, there is an initial wave of cancellations, but over the ensuing months, they end up with more paying subscribers than there were before the password-sharing crackdown.

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

Yeah, we'll see how this works out for them in the long run. I have a feeling that the end result here is they'll drive away people who use them for years, and would have continued to use them for years out of loyalty, in exchange for customers who are a lot less attached to them, and will probably be more likely to cancel later on.

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.

> 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!