This article is specifically about Australia. Globally, Netflix added 5.9 million subscribers after their password-sharing crackdown.
I hate to say it, but the crackdown worked exactly as intended.
Which really sucks. Hopefully Netflix will lose more folks after the next price hike or something. They shouldn’t be rewarded for screwing over thier customers especially after they advertised password sharing as an option.
There might have been a net benefit, but if so it’s not something you can get from this article. This is a PR Newswire style piece that’s basically just the journalist transcribing what a Netflix press relations person told them. HBO did an identical push.
The relevant questions are:
- If 5.9M was net new subscribers rather than total, and if so what was the expected value versus this time over previous years? They say it exceeded expectations but not what they were or how they were derived. From this article we can neither describe the size of the effect nor attribute it to the policy change.
- Where were the new subscribers added? The US based streaming services I’m familiar with get fully half their revenue from the US, and upwards of 80% between the US and Europe. Whatever the new market subscriber growth was needs to be subtracted from this value.
- Cancellations are going to be a lagging indicator. I share accounts with my mother, who would have a problem paying for so many accounts on her own. As soon as I run into an issue with a service regarding account sharing, I am cancelling that service. I’m moving from having about ten separate services that I pay between $5 and $15 per month for, to three services where I rotate between different ones as I catch up on content. Net users metrics will have to settle down over several months to see the real effect here because that’s how consumers work.
At the end of the day, maybe it will be a net benefit for Netflix and HBO, but until we know more, treat numbers with skepticism. They have every reason to portray their decision as a success because it makes people feel like they’re making a mountain out of a molehill if they’re the only one complaining about it.
Honestly fuck Netflix and their household crap. I’ve bought the most expensive subscription tier just so that my father and I can watch Netflix in peace… For literally two TV sets… And now that we dont live in the same house anymore, instead of thanking me for my loyalty, they want to punish me… Fuck them right back.
I’ll literally buy what the fuck ever, Hbo, Prime, Disney…, just if its not Netflix. Fuck Netflix.
They want to have their cake and eat it too with all the conditions they put on each tier. Charging for both the number of screens and where you could watch on those screens was just the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. Now I just watch their content without giving them a dime
