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posted by hubie on Thursday May 25 2023, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the cut-the-other-cord dept.

Starting now, anyone borrowing a Netflix login in the U.S. will have to get their own account or pay $7.99 a month:

After nearly a year of warnings and testing, Netflix has finally launched its password-sharing crackdown in the United States.

Anyone sharing their Netflix account login with family members or friends who don't live at the same address will be asked to pay an extra $7.99 a month for each additional person. The company started sending out emails Tuesday to people it determined are breaking the rules, and will continue to roll them out to primary account holders in the coming days. The people borrowing the login will get an update when they try to log in that tells them how to start their own account.

People who are using an account on the go will need to login from the primarily address once every 31 days to avoid being flagged.

[...] Netflix has said that 100 million people around the world use its subscription streaming service without paying for their own accounts. It started testing this crackdown on password sharing last year in other countries, but has long said it would eventually come to the U.S., where the company was founded in 1997.

[...] While the company policies have always said accounts were meant to be shared by households, it publicly embraced the practice in the past. In 2017, the official Netflix account tweeted "Love is sharing a password." And at CES in 2016, Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said the company "loved" that people share Netflix accounts and described it as "a positive thing, not a negative thing," according to CNET.

Streaming companies have been tweaking their businesses over the past year as they struggle with increasing competition and the reality that people can only afford so many monthly subscription fees. Many have raised prices, including Prime Video, Netflix and Apple TV Plus, but no other company has gone after account sharing in the same way.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 25 2023, @10:22AM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 25 2023, @10:22AM (#1308083)

    At least they didn't go the D+ route with ad supported base subscriptions vs "premium tier" rates if you don't want ads.

    I have never paid for Cable TV, well, except when the cable internet bundle was cheaper than internet alone and the last time I took that deal for the year it was offered I never even removed the cable decoder box from it's shrink wrap. I did have free cable for about a year when I bought a house and it took the cable company that long to disconnect the previous owners' service. During that year I also installed an OTA antenna, and didn't miss the cable when it finally went away. Basically all I watched on it that didn't come OTA was Trek TNG reruns at more convenient air times (and after a year of VCR taping TNG 5 days a week I had most of the 178 episodes...)

    Years later, our first DVD player came with a Netflix promo flyer in the box, we subscribed, stopped going to Blockbuster (roughly revenue neutral transition) and have continuously had the one base level Netflix subscription ever since. Next houses didn't even get (or want) OTA antennae.

    I suspect this change will have no impact on us, hopefully it doesn't result in a rate increase due to multiple location users migrating to other services.

    I'll say it again: No ads defines our reason for Netflix. Netflix with ads would result in immediate termination of our now roughly 25 year continuous subscription.

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday May 25 2023, @01:56PM (1 child)

    by Freeman (732) on Thursday May 25 2023, @01:56PM (#1308105) Journal

    Except Netflix did go that route. They have an ad-supported tier, just like Disney Plus. I believe they both added it around the same time. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831 [netflix.com]

    Netflix is also killing their DVD rentals, which is kind of sad, but we canceled our DVD plan recently. So, I don't have any skin in that game anymore, anyway.

    We've been talking about reducing our monthly subscriptions to streaming platforms. We canceled Disney Plus this week and earlier this month or so we switched to TMobile, which took over our payments to Netflix. That just leaves us paying for Amazon Prime, which isn't just a video streaming platform. In the event that Amazon decides to charge separately for Prime and Prime Video, we may just cancel that whole thing, too. Then we have YouTube which is trying to crack-down on people using ad-blockers. It's not surprising, but there's no way I'm using YouTube's platform with their horrible advertisement system.

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 25 2023, @02:29PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 25 2023, @02:29PM (#1308116)

      Yeah, I forgot about that ad tier of Netflix, did they raise my ad-free rate 40% like D+ did? I try not to get too worked up about little stuff I can't change anyway.

      >Netflix is also killing their DVD rentals, which is kind of sad, but we canceled our DVD plan recently. So, I don't have any skin in that game anymore, anyway.

      Yeah, we held on to DVD rentals until maybe 10-12 years ago when the streaming content picked up to a point that there's enough time to be wasted on it that we don't need to waste any more time with a wider selection available on DVD. The other thing that really sucked about that time was that, in the beginning, you could get just about ANYTHING (within reason) as a DVD rental on Netflix, but after streaming started with it's little steaming pile of not-so-great content, they also cut back on the selection in the DVD catalog, little by little, until eventually I just said: "what's the point?"

      My 19 year old son told us that he wanted D+, so he gets it, under his name, paid by him, but (shhhh.... don't tell Disney) we also watch it as a family together in addition to what he streams for himself alone. When they price-hiked for the ad-free option, I would have dropped them if it was for me, but it's not, so we still have it.

      I'm sorry to hear that you're addicted to Prime, they also got my 19 year old but luckily we were able to council him about cost-benefit ratios and the wallet draining effects of suggestive sell techniques before his free month expired.

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