Posted on 12/22/2022 2:46:36 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
Netflix is reportedly poised to cancel the widespread user practice of "password sharing," limiting accounts to one single household in a move to shore up its struggling bottom line.
The streaming company several years ago "identified password sharing as a major problem eating into subscriptions," the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, but did not move to address it until this year due to significant gains in subscribers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That boom in subscribers "masked the extent of the password-sharing issue," Co-Chief Executive Reed Hastings reportedly told executives earlier this year, with company sources telling the Journal that Netflix recently decided to act on the problem as the company saw a subsequent downturn in subscribers.
The new rules will allegedly go into effect early next year.
Password-sharing has been a long-accepted custom among Netflix users, so much so that the company itself once acknowledged the habit on its official Twitter feed.
(Excerpt) Read more at justthenews.com ...
Eh, can’t really argue with them on this. It’s common and costs them money.
Yeah, sort of surprised they haven’t cracked down on this much before now. Should be easy to do with IP tracking etc. I was at an AirBnB fairly recently and the previous guest left their account on so I just used theirs rather than log into my own.
I heard they created a new higher tier plan so for something like $5 extra you could give someone else their own sub account, so they could have their own lists and watch at a different location.
The problem is, cracking down on it won’t gain them any additional revenue. The people who are password sharing are already demonstrating they don’t care about following every jot and tittle of the laws. If their free Netflix gets shut down, they’ll just go watch Netflix shows on the pirate sites.
How do they do this when you can stream Netflix from multiple devices? Don’t they already have different tiers that allow concurrent streaming from multiple devices?
They may do it like Apple, you can register x number of devices on one account.
Lots of folks who are willing to use a relative’s password know nothing about pirate sites, and likely wouldn’t touch them even if they did. And I’d guess many of the tech savvy people who know about pirate sites likely are using them already and not bothering with passwords.
Or they may look and see that subscriber “X” has one TV on in Dallas and another on in London over a period of months.
I would think most sharing is between people in the same city.
I suppose they could also limit the number of devices streaming at one time.
Unless they're using a VPN, especially from overseas.
I'm surprised that people find enough to watch in that garbage pile called Netflix that they'd bother sharing a password to do it.
I hope they don’t do it by IP but by some other unique ID like a MAC or streaming device ID. Most households do what’s called Network Address Translation or NAT where their public IP is visible wherever they go, but they have numerous private IPs in their home network allowing multiple devices to stream at the same time.
If they restrict it to 1 stream per IP, gonna be a lot of screaming.
Netflix was one of the few companies that I could actually tell them why I cancelled their services. They sent so many coupons and freebies trying to get me to come back. Screw ‘em.
25 year old man babies living on Mommy and Daddys dime in some apartment surrounded by bong water and Dortios will be saddened by this news.
This could affect all but one of their users.
Exactly.
I have a family account so that I can watch this show down in my family room and my kids can watch some other show up in their bedroom at the same time.
All my streaming services do this. Of course, we're all on the same WiFi server.
Netflix has been losing money with people sharing multiple accounts, a dozen+, across multiple WiFi servers.
Think, your kid goes off to college and shares his account/password with multiple friends across multiple WiFi servers, across multiple domiciles.
It's completely understandable that they'd want to limit this.
Yep.
I think it “evolves.” I know my daughter was using the password from our house when she was in college. I found out when I changed it.
Lol to your whole post, especially the “Dortios.”
So true.
LOL, and it bet it didn't take very long to find out.
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