Netflix is going to start charging you $3 to share your password

[iMore.com]

Netflix has started trialling an extra $3 for customers who share their passwords with people outside of their home. Full story from the iMore Blog...

 

[HelloNNNewman]

If they try and enforce this and it causes issues - I'm out. How are they planning on doing this correctly? I travel for work, log in on various devices from hotels or family homes. I've got Netflix installed on several Roku devices, tablet, laptops, cell phone... all of which are mine. If they try and ding me for more $ because they see me log in from a device that isn't my billing zipcode because I'm on the road, I'll happily drop them. There's very little on there that I can't get on the other 5 paid services I have along with all the free options. Pissing off your long time members isn't a good way to recover from losing members. LOL Hopefully my rant is just jumping the gun and there won't be any issues, but the aren't the only game in town any longer and have lost a lot of content to the other services anyhow. Plus - their own content suuuuuuuucks. haha No reason to pay even more (beyond their last rate hike) just to watch a couple of so-so items the came out with.

OK..rant over.

 

[Just_Me_D]

I know there are people out there who take advantage of the service by giving out their login credentials to friends and acquaintances. At the same time, the service has taken advantage of the customer by passing along whatever increase they incur. It will be into to see how this plays out.

 

[Lee_Bo]

My son uses my account and he’s 2 counties over. With as many customers as Netflix has already lost, this might me the final nail.

 

[Up_And_Away]

I can totally understand people not liking a new password sharing restriction that used to be commonplace. It is essentially a perk being take away. But Netflix is likely just the first for what will be adopted by most in some shape or form.
It may seem like Streaming is very profitable based on Wall Street loud mouthed TV investors and the previously absurd stock price multiples, but it actually isn’t. Netflix is an outlier of profitability but even they didn’t break double digit profit margins until the pandemic. They hit above 15% but it has been falling back a point or two. And this is a 220+ million subscriber base paying nit insignificant prices
There was a story back a bit that Amazon Prime Video loses money as a standalone (sales outside of video makes Prime profitable). Disney+ isn’t profitable but is projected to be so in a couple of years. AppleTV+ is likely a country mile from profitability. If Google TV is actually profitable, it is a bag of coins comparatively and is because of their incredible data gathering and monetization of that data. And these are all deep deep pocketed streamers. Except for Disney, the rest can operate at a loss if it creates profit elsewhere.
Consolidation, price increases, increased ad/data gathering along with password sharing limitations, these are all coming. Once subscriptions peak and level off (and profit is single digit margin) they will begin these ways to cut cost.

 

[Annie_M]

It’s definitely annoying. I was out doing errands yesterday and when I got home my husband told me that when he opened Netflix on our TV through a Roku box that iMessage came up on the screen saying that we had too many screens open. The only other one that was possibly open was on my iPad but I hadn’t been watching it for several hours. We don’t share our password or credentials with anyone. I occasionally watch Netflix at work during lunch but other than that we watch it only at home. Of course if we travel there’s a remote possibility that I might watch it on my iPad but this whole policy is going to be annoying. Might be a time to say goodbye to Netflix But I’m currently in the middle of a few series that I watch regularly. So I guess I’ll tough it out but I don’t think I’ll be a regular subscriber. I subscribe through gift cards that I get at Kroger. I choose to do this because of the gas rewards and given the price of sure these days it’s worth it.