A few days ago, the Internet was hit by another unfortunate news: Netflix clearly hinted that they are planning to take down sharing passwords. I believe that plenty of people were unpleasantly shocked since sharing accounts became a way to save more money on movie-streaming services. Instead of paying 10$ for a month, you could have split up this sum with 5 other people and pay only 2$ monthly. Moreover, you could have shared your own profile with other people making it even cheaper or even for free. Netflix said that it’s about to the best option on how to “monetize sharing”. According to their calculations, Netflix is being shared with 100 million additional households.
There are 2 specific reasons for this decision. Starting 2022 the service struggles a lot.
- For the first 3 months of 2022 Netflix lost around 200k customers instead of gaining 2.5 million as it was predicted by their forecast. As it is known, the reason for that is occurring strong competition which was hard to face with.
- More obvious reason, which influences majority of the businesses as of now is russian-Ukrainian war. Thankfully, Netflix suspended its services in russia but it led to the loss of almost 700,000 users.
The first payment plans are about to be tested in Costa Rica, Chile and Peru – allowing users to create cheap sub-profiles. Users can add up to 2 profiles for 2$ each on top of the regular fee.
Majority of the people are not happy with this decision but we should all agree that the business must somehow survive and it’s one of the easiest way they could have done to leave their consumers relatively “untouched”. What do you think about it? Have you shared your Netflix profile with others and how do you look at new regulations?
Resources:
https://www.polygon.com/23033421/netflix-account-sharing-passwords-subscriber-loss
Maybe the reason they are losing subscribers is down to the platform being inflated with subpar content. The concentration on Quantity > Quality isn’t paying off and platforms like HBO Max are capitalising on this
I agree with 45234-EX’s point. However, The drop in subscribers can also mean that the industry has been fully penetrated by Netflix. Who doesn’t have a Netflix subscription? I don’t know anybody without one. Maybe there simply aren’t a lot of new people that can buy the subscription, and the ones leaving are people who also agree with 45234-EX’s point that the content is bad.