Netflix said love is sharing a password, and love will now cost you $7.99
In the middle of a labor movement based around studios and streamers’ corporate greed, the studios and streamers step into one blunder after another
Aux News Netflix
Six years after regrettably tweeting, “Love is sharing a password,” Netflix has put a price on love, and it’s $7.99. The password-sharing apocalypse consumers have been staring down the barrel of for years has finally come to pass. The company has begun emailing subscribers about how they’ll have to pay even more money for a service that seemingly gets worse every year. That’s love, baby.
Practically, this will finally get all the ex-romantic partners, roommates, and other miscellaneous stowaways off our Netflix accounts. And it’s not the $2 or $3 extra per shared account prices that were bandied about when the company tested it two years ago. It’s basically the price of a regular Netflix subscription to add a new user to an existing account. Sharing subscribers can finally pay those retro 2014 prices for the service or transfer their profile and open their own account for full price. What a steal!
But that’s not all: Only users paying for Netflix’s most expensive plans will have the option to share a password—with some serious restrictions. For one thing, with the “Standard” $15.99/month Netflix Subscription, users are only allowed to add two extra members; its highest-priced tier plan allows for three. So basically, they’re forcing everyone to go ahead and get a plan, or at the very least, giving password-sharers a slight discount on a plan, something akin to a cell phone family plan.
But for parents sending their kids off to college, this means another expense. Anyone on Netflix’s “Basic” or “Standard with Ads” plans will have to upgrade in order to share their account for $7.99 per extra member. And if someone has multiple kids in college, they’ll have to play favorites, upgrade their plan or buy new subscriptions for the less-loved child. Under a “Standard” $15.49 Netflix plan, that might look like this: Parents will send little Timmy an invitation to be an extra member and pay $7.99 a month, so he can enjoy Wednesday as he struggles through freshman year at Rutgers. Little Sally can also get in on the action at NYU for an additional $7.99. But if little Suzy, who starts her Oberlin journey this fall, wants to join the family plan, they’ll have to upgrade to Premium, which is $5 a month more than Standard, and add another extra member for $7.99, or Suzy will have to get her own subscription. Ain’t the streaming wars grand?
Password sharing is an age-old tradition on Netflix, one the streamer was happy to ride to success. After all, the company estimated that 100 million accounts shared passwords—43% of its users. “We love people sharing Netflix whether they’re two people on a couch or 10 people on a couch,” Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said in 2016. “That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.” What this new structure does is force people to buy a new couch from Netflix, a company that generated $2.1 billion in its first quarter this year, potentially ruining Memorial Day weekend as the children of subscribers play IT support for those trying to navigate this mess.
Netflix’s latest unforced error mirrors that of the newly rebranded Max, which, in an effort to confuse the hell out of its consumers days before the biggest episode of its biggest show airs, decided to make its name change a new app instead of an update. Then Warner Bros. Discovery violated agreements with the DA by not giving directors proper credit on the app. It’s a mess that seems likely to get worse the closer we get to millions logging on at the same time to watch the Succession finale this Sunday.
These moves reflect a complete and utter disregard not only for the creative community but also consumers. Netflix, which regularly throws money away on projects no one can remember days after they are declared the most-watched movie in the history of cinema, is giving subscribers yet another reason to side with labor. Love was sharing a password. Now love is nickel and dime’ing consumers to please investors. To borrow another one of the company’s catchphrases: Netflix is a joke.
20 Comments
But for parents sending their kids off to college, this means another expense.They’ll just learn to pirate everything, like the generation before them.
the current gen-z version of pirating is googling “123movie john wick” or whatever and then watching it in a horrific 480p quality with ads burned into the subtitles. hopefully this will push them to find a friend with a decent plex server lol
My nephew watches pirated episodes of anime on YouTube that have been mirrored, put in a weird split-screen, and broken up into 3-minute segments to beat the copyright detection. These kids are living like fucking animals.
Or living like Eastern Europeans.
Savages. Fucking savages. I’m sorry, but there’s no other term for them.
We have let them down. We must pass down the knowledge of VPNs and downloading full HD movies at 12 MB/s, or it will become lost.
Then Sergey uploads a Trojan to your phone or PC. You get an international pen pal of sorts.
Jeez, it costs $8 for free speech, and $7.99 for love. I hope nobody starts charging me for my existential dread, I honestly don’t know what I’d be without it.
$7.99 for love also gets you free herpes
We’re actually having a sale on dread. Just scan this QR code tattooed to my forehead…
We cancelled Netflix after the Chappelle debacle. They keep emailing to beg us to come back. It’s sad.
I get those e-mails too. Funnily enough, they want me back, but they never offer a discount. So they can get bent.
It’s an automated email you dumbfuck
Still no explanation of how this is actually supposed to work. Is every different IP address going to be considered a new “user”? If not, what’s to stop people from just sharing the same user account?
Based on this:https://help.netflix.com/en/node/128339?ba=SwiftypeResultClick&q=householdit looks like, if they’re telling the truth, yeah, your (externally visible) IP address is what they’re looking at. Meaning all devices on the same home WiFi will be a household.
And anyone watching on their phones or iPad or whatever over cellular is going to be considered a separate user? Yeah, this will end well.
“These moves reflect a complete and utter disregard not only for the creative community but also consumers. Netflix… is giving subscribers yet another reason to side with labor”Wait, cracking down on shared passwords shows disregard for creatives? Sharing a password is siding with ‘labor’? Supporting creative labor would mean paying for content, not stealing it.
Even the fantasy of fair pay for creatives wouldn’t negate the need for companies to boost profit and cash on hand for investments and emergencies.
“These moves reflect a complete and utter disregard not only for the creative community”I’m sorry, I’m gonna need you to explain how this works, because it sounds wrong.Also you do realize that you’re basically going all in for pirating a service, right?
Someone who can read a financial statement should be writing these. This is not an unforced error. It’s a recognition that companies need to switch from growth at all costs to lasting profit.Netflix had free cash flow of $2.1 billion in the latest quarter, which means that is available money to invest or pay down emergency costs. That is not revenue. Its revenue (about $8.24 billion) in the latest quarter missed estimates by about a quarter billion. The thing hindering revenue growth? Password sharing (in part). Non-paying customers aren’t customers. They’re costs (unless you’re talking about a wholly ad supported platform, in which case they are the key business driver and password sharing wouldn’t even be a thing). Servers and the fossil fuel hungry electric grid they draw from are not cheap. Just as influencers have learned that “you can’t pay the bills with exposure,” streamers finally realized that growth without profit is a game only the very stupid play. It would have been smart for Netflix to slowly introduce paid password sharing at much lower rates to habituate people to actually paying for the things they access but the company is so mature now they just have to pull the trigger at a much more jarring price point. All their competitors will do the same, so no one will be the sole “bad guy” in the market. Piracy will absolutely rise (it already has just from the sheer number of services that collectively are financially out of reach for many). But even if they get 10 or 20 percent of non-paying users to pony up it will be good for the business. While exec pay and creatives’ pay should be reallocated to be fair, that alone wouldn’t propel Netflix to strong, lasting profitability. Paying customers are all that matters now. They’re in a fight to the death with their competitors and cash will determine fates.