Honestly, I wouldn't have minded something like "buy an extra member" if it were introduced years ago. Introducing it now just seems to be a trigger to re-evaluate "is Netflix really worth that much" at a time their content selection doesn't look as amazing as it once did. I'm coming from a background of having recently cancelled my account though, and may be biased in thinking along those lines as a result.
Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.
I wish they had done this from the get go. My family has never shared a password with anybody, and I'm pretty confident that some of their price hikes reflected the reality that they had to deal with password sharers.
All I know is that with the fracturing of the streaming landscape, where everything requires a separate $8.99/$11.99/$15.99 (or whatever) monthly fee, downloading Linux ISOs starts to look more and more attractive.
Should have shared passwords, at least you could trade a Netflix for a Hulu or whatever.
Apple TV is $6.99 a month. Netflix looks to be $9.99 (ignoring the ad-subsidized offering which isn’t really comparable). It is kind of hard to share an Apple TV login (at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to share it without also sharing my whole Apple account), so I guess that extra $3 must be the price of all the sharing going on.
Although, Apple TV seems to have much better in-house shows, so who knows?
>Should have shared passwords, at least you could trade a Netflix for a Hulu or whatever.
Yeah, I fell into the "do the right thing, it will be better" trap.
The modern solution is to sign up for a service, binge watch everything on it, and then cancel. But I don't really binge watch, and we have enough people in the house with different tastes it doesn't really work that well.
What really killed me is I pay for PBS Passport. But there are some shows with different licenses (I guess) that are only available on other services.
It gets a bit more complicated than that, e.g. Apple TV+ doesn't have tiers and the $9.99 Netflix plan won't get you 4k. That said, it's also more complicated than assuming the cost difference is all due to password sharing. Who has the better media agreements? Is a particular player trying to buy market share or focusing on maximizing margin of the share they have? How does having an integrated hardware ecosystem vs partners play into the cost structure? These, and more, can all factor into the subscription price, beyond password sharing.
Maybe a bit off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone else actively avoids 4k? I hate watching content in ultra high resolution. It looks strange and unreal to me (Yes: I've turned off "soap opera mode")
I'm really glad netflix makes it easy to avoid higher resolution versions of their shows =/
Do you have weird post-processing/sharpening on your TV (other than "soap opera mode")? There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K. Your eyes aren't somehow low resolution with 1080p closer to that realism.
>There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K
Yes there is. For one, 90% of non-native 4K is absolute crap. Upscales tend to bludgeon detail even compared to 480p/i sources, and DNR is rather crap, especially on the intense settings companies typically use.
Native 4k can be better, but there’s still so many mastering options that it still causes problems. See Star Wars, LotR, Terminator 2 as all rather controversial 4K releases.
I wonder if this is it. I definitely notice artifacts more in higher resolution.
Low resolution video doesn't bother me at all. I can happily watch 480p. But the weird compression artifacts following moving objects absolutely frustrate and distract me.
Maybe streaming services aren't encoding their higher resolution streams with a sufficient bitrate? Or maybe the higher resolution makes the artifacts more noticeable? Either way, the low resolution experience seems consistently superior.
Nope, and I notice it on my computer monitor as well so I'm sure this isn't the case.
> "There's really no reason to watch 1080p instead of 4K. Your eyes aren't somehow low resolution with 1080p closer to that realism."
This is definitely not the case and one of the big reasons is lossy compression. Precision without accuracy can be very noticeable, in terms of artifacting.
> It is kind of hard to share an Apple TV login (at least I wasn’t able to figure out how to share it without also sharing my whole Apple account)
You do it by setting up family sharing. But yeah it's super integrated, you'll be sharing a lot more than just Apple TV+ if you just set it naively.
If the goal is to just share TV+, then maybe a solution could be to create a separate Apple ID just for that, but actually using it will be difficult for Apple users.
My guess is this is Apples probably very successful way of disincentivising "account sharing" (as in, swapping access for your friends Hulu, Netfilx, etc, while enabling actual account sharing within a family)
It's still declaring an intention to commit a crime either way though, isn't it? Unless you truly believe any prosecutorial organization wouldn't be able to crack the code.
I think they were making a thinly-veiled reference to torrenting (because for a long time the only legit use case for torrenting was Linux images?) but I'm not sure
Talking about it in jokes and codes just strikes me as either immature or ashamed, like how teenagers talk about sex or drugs. I think if they believe what they're doing is justified then they shouldn't be ashamed, and there's no reason to talk in code since that's definitely not protecting them one bit from any sort of legal action.
I used to subscribe ALL of the streaming services (Netflix, HBO Max, tv+, Paramount+, Disney+, Hulu etc.) but cancelled all of them because it was getting too much choices on too shallow content. Now I rely on PBS (Passport that comes with my monthly donation), YouTube and Peacock (comes free with Xfinity wifi) and if I like a movie I could just rent it. This is working out well for me.
> Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.
I suspect you're right about this. This change has no effect on the people who aren't sharing their account, so those people have very little incentive to comment except perhaps out of sympathy for those who it will affect. So most of the uproar will understandably be negative, even if a majority of users do not share their account.
These services only have new good content like 50% of the time. So it makes more sense to cycle subscriptions on and off. This is harder if you’ve given someone your password (I’d definitely not be subscribed to Disney+ right now if my sibling wasn’t using it).
I think we're in agreement. I said it doesn't affect people who aren't sharing their password, and you seem to be talking about cases where passwords are being shared.
I suspect most people won’t even realise. I do share mine with my gran who I set up with a smart tv and Internet during Covid because she was stuck in the house on her own, and my daughter who was away at university.
I feel like I’ve already watched anything worth watching and would have cancelled my subscription already if it wasn’t for my family still using it.
I was probably ~3 years delayed in cancelling Netflix based on actually using it. I started maintaining a watchlist of what I actually want to watch instead of constantly searching/cross-referencing through what is new or currently available on these interfaces designed to hide how little good new content is actually there. Eventually I found out there wasn't really that much I was actually interested in on the services anymore and, for what there was, I came the conclusion pirating was once again the better option in terms of availability, quality, and user experience.
Barring returning to piracy, I think I'd still have cancelled but sometimes subscribed for a month on the rare occasion something like The Queen's Gambit (2020) came out then cancel for a few years again.
Netflix is the one that's probably the most marginal for me these days. I don't really binge watch or drop in and out much but I should probably look with summer coming up to see if I really want it given I have other services and I watch a fairly modest amount of video.
Netflix's selection doesn't really have the staying power of HBO's selection.
HBO has some all-time classics that will be watched and discussed for decades, not just months. Sopranos is still discussed and rewatched and memed. Same with The Wire.
I feel that Netflix's offerings are hot for a few months, then fade from public memory.
Overall it'll be interesting to see how much impact this actually has or doesn't have for subscription volume. My guess is maybe not as much as the usual uproared comments would have you think.