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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 26 2023, @03:17PM (1 child)
>They would likely want a "infrastructure maintenance fee" tacked onto the bill that purports
Not only purports, but if that maintenance fee is on the order of $5 per month, it's likely true - the cost of keeping a customer is probably at least that, not only to maintain the network of cables, amplifiers, etc. but also to pay for the (laughably bad, but still not free) customer service, and don't forget: sales and advertising. In 10 years we have easily consumed $600 worth of non-content related service from Comcast, mostly because of how poorly they manage themselves, how often we had to re-explain our problem to customer service, how many of their contractors came to our home and "found no problem", etc.
When I bought my first house and used basically only hot water for showers, a refrigerator and a TV sometimes I was a bit outraged that my electric bill was $18 with $7 (almost 40%!!!) of that being "customer charge". Of course, later when female company moved in, demanded an electric clothes dryer, A/C running all the time, 600W of lighting, etc. that $7 customer charge fell to an insignificant 3% of the total bill.
If that infrastructure fee ever creeps up over $15 a month it's pretty easy to call B.S. against other similar service providers who do it for much less... might even be a case for regulation.
The problem with all such great ideas is that: somewhere in any great idea somebody in the existing system is going to lose their fat cash cow. Nevermind if the cow is being butchered to divide among more deserving recipients, nevermind if it means lower costs and better service to the customers and therefore more customers and even higher total income for the system overall, when somebody with a fat cash cow is at risk of losing it, they will go to great lengths (including great expense) to protect their position, particularly through regulation and legislation which make effective barriers to change and competition.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by owl on Saturday May 27 2023, @04:03AM
How very true, and that is likely the downfall of something like this (or most any other alternative that might be thought up). They all cause slaughter of a massive cash cow -- and so the current recipient of that cow's cash output will most definitely fight to keep their cow giving milk day in and day out.