In 2000, everyone I knew pirated content because official platforms were broken, and piracy was more convenient and worked better.<p>In 2010 everyone I knew paid their media tax through Netflix or a similar provider since paid services were more convenient than piracy, and things just worked.<p>Somehow, in the past 2-5 years, piracy is quickly moving back as the more convenient option.<p>The core problem with entertainment is you're paying for fun. Spending hours fighting with broken service is not fun. Increasingly, these services provide negative value to me.
So… I have 8 weeks of vacation a year… does this mean I won’t be able to use my account for 6 of these weeks? What about going to my vacation home during weekends? I do it multiple times a month… why should I pay more for accessing Netflix from a different address? If they start this bullshit in my country they will loose a 10 years loyal customer playing for premium 4K streaming. I have as well prime, Disney+ And Apple TV+… I can survive without them!
The endless pursuit of revenue to suit shareholders. Netflix can’t increase subs anymore as who would subscribe have already and luxuries are first to go in a depressed economy. So you look for the next low hanging fruit to launder.
I have a friend who is a divorced father, and the only two people on his account are himself and his son, who don't live in the same household.<p>Divorce is fairly common, and coming on top of another recent price hike, they are going to be shedding customers.
My wife and I live in the US. My kids spend the school year with their mom in Canada, and spend summers, vacations, and many weekends here in the US. We’re only about 100 miles away from each other, but it crosses an international border. For more than a decade, my kids have been on my account. All of their history and recommendations are attached to their profile in my account. If they want to move their profiles over to their mother’s account for the nine months of the year that they are in Canada, they can’t. They just use their existing profiles in my account at both homes.<p>In my case, nobody is “stealing” anything. My immediate family has had to deal with these international issues for about eight years, where the kids spend about three months in the US and nine months in Canada every year, crossing the border every 3-4 weeks.<p>I have no idea how Netflix’s changes are going to affect my family.<p>Taking another example: Disney+ and Hulu. Hulu is majority (but not entirely) owned by Disney (post-20th Century Fox acquisition). In the US, we have Disney+ and Hulu as separate services. In Canada there is no Hulu, but Disney+ offers something called “Star” which is more-or-less non-US Hulu. In other words, Disney is already getting 2 subscriptions out of me in the US for content that only requires one subscription in other countries.<p>But I don’t mind. Why? Because Disney has high quality content. Even if I don’t want to watch it, none of it is necessarily “bad”. Netflix, OTOH, churns out so much garbage. And most of their original shows get canceled far too early. I now avoid most new Netflix shows until it has a few seasons under its belt, because I’m tired of getting invested into shows that are canceled after a cliff-hanger.<p>Ted Sarandos: I’m looking at you.
currently rolled out to some countries<p>Argentina:
<a href="https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126602/ar" rel="nofollow">https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126602/ar</a>
How do they know where a home is? Are they going to require Location permissions? Are they going to do silly geoIP things which are worse than useless?
I think their goal is to remove non-paying customers which is reasonable thing to do from their business perspective.<p>I'm not sure how exactly this would affect 99% of their paying customers. People who travel all the time would probably watch it on their laptops/tablets anyway so it won't affect them.
I'm pretty sure this'll be rolled out in geos where sharing your account with 5+ people in different addresses is common.<p>They're not gonna come first at the people who use Netflix from two addresses regularly, there's no point to start from there.
It’s still unclear to me how they count the two weeks on a location. If I go to my summer house every weekend, does that count? Or do they count when you use Netflix at multiple locations at the same time?
Genuine question to commenters that are poopooing this: why? Price hikes are annoying, and the content quality has been decaying recently, but those are separate issues.<p>Why shouldn’t Netflix seek to clamp down on account sharing? This seems to strike a nice balance that makes it easy to continue sharing, and not disrupt existing profiles, etc whilst charging a small premium for the privilege.