One-Third Of US Netflix Subscribers Admit They Share Their Passwords, Survey Finds (deadline.com) 65
About one-third of U.S. subscribers to Netflix share their login credentials with others, according to new data from Leichtman Research Group. From the report: The research firm's online survey of 4,400 consumers confirms the company's own conclusions in recent years. While 64% of respondents said they pay for and use Netflix only in their own household, 33% indicate some form of sharing. (The remaining 3% are households whose Netflix comes packaged via other subscriptions.) Netflix has about 74 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada and has penetrated nearly 70% of U.S. broadband homes. With subscription growth flattening in the region of late, Netflix has recently phased in rate increases in order to continue funding its $18 billion in annual programming spending. Earlier this month, Netflix announced a test of monthly fees for password-sharing in three territories outside of the U.S. The rise of password sharing between households, a blog post explained, is âoeimpacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.â
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It's hard to define overpriced. It's a long way from cable prices and I find more value in it.
But people have this feeling that things involving the Internet should be cheaper or free.
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Of course things should be cheaper or free. It doesn't cost anything to make a product.
* For those who might be wondering if that was sarcasm.
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Cable included delivery though.
As someone living alone I feel it's overpriced though.
Their single screen plan is standard definition only, and if I want to get 4k it's something like $20 now, and unless I can watch 4 things are once it's a waste.
When they went from $12 to 15 for the 4k account I cancelled. I would happily pay for a single screen account if it at least did HD.
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Does that mean netflix is simply overpriced?
I think it might be more along the lines that some people don't feel it's worth subscribing just to binge watch one series, especially if you already subscribe to a bunch of other streaming services.
While there isn't anything I personally watch on Netflix (they lost the rights to everything I used to watch), I pretty much feel similarly about Paramount Plus. The only thing on there I'm interested in is Star Trek and it just doesn't feel like it's worth subscribing just to watch something I used to get for
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"Does that mean netflix is simply overpriced?"
No it means that Amazon Prime has a better business model, nobody will share that password, you can buy anything with it.
Netflix might be shooting themselves in the foot. (Score:2)
We recently decided that Netflix was no longer worthwhile for us. So she will be cancelling, and this is before they started talking about cracking down on sharing. If they crack down on shared accounts, suddenly it seems even less appealing.
We were thinking about cycling her account through a few different streaming services, a couple of months at a time.
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I canceled my Netflix account because I ran out of new content to watch. Maybe Netflix should be focusing on fixing that "issue" instead of raising prices and cracking down on password sharing.
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They spend more on content than any other company.
They're just not good at curating it IMO.
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I canceled my Netflix account because I ran out of new content to watch. Maybe Netflix should be focusing on fixing that "issue" instead of raising prices and cracking down on password sharing.
Fair enough. There are so many streaming services producing so much content, one needs to pick and choose.
At the same time, I don't really want to pay between $7.99 and $70 per month to Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, HBO, Peacock, Fubo, PBS, and whoever pops up this week. Some of them I only watch once in a blue moon. I'm sure many people feel the same and share.
What I kind of wonder about is the definition of "household". I'd love to see how much people stretch this. My kids are in and out of my house and
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My GF and I share our streaming accounts, I use her Netflix, and she uses my Prime video. We recently decided that Netflix was no longer worthwhile for us. So she will be cancelling, and this is before they started talking about cracking down on sharing. If they crack down on shared accounts, suddenly it seems even less appealing. We were thinking about cycling her account through a few different streaming services, a couple of months at a time.
I'm guessing that is a relatively common occurrence - especially amongst friends/family living in the same area so it's harder to geolocate shared users. VPNs add to the problem of geolocating. Even 2 streams at once, with different IPS in my house would be an ATV and iPad on my cell plan.
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
Everytime I sign into netflix I am presented with a dialog box nagging me for my phone number and telling me it's required for account recovery and if I don't give it to them, I might lose access. They can go ahead and cancel my account because they're not getting my phone number.
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Seems legit. Aussie Carrot Top is scary. [yahooserious.com]
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continuing to charge your credit card,
You can stop that.
one third share (Score:2)
... and the other two-thirds are lying about it
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Truth.
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My house doesn't share with anyone outside the house. I don't know that 2/3rds of people have the same stance, but I gotta think there are more individuals and single-house Netflix accounts than you'd imagine. I and my wife aren't that unique in any other way, I can't think we'd be unique in this.
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I haven't checked that in a while, but I know there used to be tiers based on how many concurrent streams you want to be able to watch "in the house."
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And there is some incentive to not just hand it out to people on the street, since there is a maximum number of concurrent streams per login, isn't there?
It's this concurrent streams limit that allows them to charge $5 per month per other household you gave your password to.
Make family plans affordable (Score:3)
Much like piracy you are dealing with people who will not pay for a full price subscription if they couldn't access via a shared password so don't bother looking at is as losing that $15 a month and maybe you could make an extra $3 a month if you offered a cheap way to add users to a single account. Maybe set the limit on 1 extra IP address or external user to prevent widespread abuse
Also Netflix is the prime example of the issues with business looking for just infinite growth. Maybe just settle on having a maximum of 60-80 millions subscribers and build a budget around maintaining that while making a decent margin off the top. Maybe expecting subscriber growth year after year after year is untenable. Maybe you can build a company off making a steady, maintainable profit and not have to make all the profit all the time, but I understand the "shareholders" simply cannot accept that and thus it will probably lead to negative outcomes for Netflix over time.
Re: Make family plans affordable (Score:2)
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What are you smoking; there are lots of business that have a non-zero stock price and very real caps on potential expansion.
You don't have to have some unlimited growth potential to be investable. However it is true that you have to be 1) profitable
2) sustainable in terms of market cap, and margin
There are plenty of stable companies that people happily hold shares in so as to collect dividends.
As usually the people complaining about capitalism and markets understand fuck all about them - what a surprise.
Re: Make family plans affordable (Score:2)
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Much like piracy you are dealing with people who will not pay for a full price subscription if they couldn't access via a shared password so don't bother looking at is as losing that $15 a month...
That's just as accurate as companies claiming every single act of piracy is a lost sale. Of course there are going to be people willing to pay for Netflix if they lose an account that belonged to some one else. The question is how many will sign up and how many will do without and if Netflix has even half a brain they have people whose job it is to determine whether the company would benefit from cutting the sharers off or not.
This is probably why they havent taken steps to stop the practice up until now de
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Much like piracy you are dealing with people who will not pay for a full price subscription if they couldn't access via a shared password so don't bother looking at is as losing that $15 a month and maybe you could make an extra $3 a month if you offered a cheap way to add users to a single account. Maybe set the limit on 1 extra IP address or external user to prevent widespread abuse
That A. doesn't prevent widespread abuse, because people could just get a shared VPN, and B. creates major headaches for actual customers, because people who live in the same household do not share an IP address on their mobile devices.
If Netflix weren't available on your phone, that might be a plausible approach, but....
Anecdotal evidence (Score:2)
I know people during last fall called netflix to cancel and they were told to share an account with a friend to reduce costs by netflix reps. It makes sense, those who quit can lower their price and netflix gets free marketing and one less subscription canceled. Later on I'll bet netflix will tighten their grip and either raise their prices or force subscriptions to improve their revenue.
Re: Anecdotal evidence (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)m sure thatâ(TM)s because the customer service reps are rewarded for each subscriber they retain. Im sure their bonus or continued employment is dependent on how many times they can talk someone out of cancelling service.
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Later on I'll bet netflix will tighten their grip and either raise their prices or force subscriptions to improve their revenue.
Too late. They just raised their prices (over $20/mo for 4k) which made me quit it. Too many other alternatives and not enough time.
not enough revenue (Score:2)
Because 1.1 Billion a month isn't enough to cover costs for the service + production. >.>
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Define 'household' (Score:2)
I don't share any of my various accounts. But if they are checking by location/IP addresses, I have enough houses to put myself on numerous shit-lists.
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I don't share any of my various accounts. But if they are checking by location/IP addresses, I have enough houses to put myself on numerous shit-lists.
I have smart phone for every adult household member, an iPod for every minor household member at least 5 years old, plus 2 TVs. Only the TVs are stationary, so I don't know if we'll be flagged for streaming on our smart phones during out of state summer road trips.
Between a rock and hard place... (Score:2)
Netflix and other streaming video services, need to play a careful pricing game here.
If they up the ante too much, in terms of cracking down on password sharing or by increasing subscription cost too much, then end users will just go back to old ways - pirated content.
The same applies to starting to introduce advertising to paying users - and introducing "tiers" - nope, they haven't done that yet, but I'm sure there's some bean counters and marketing types chomping at the bit to increase revenue in this man
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Pirated content was always an inconvenience and still mostly is.
A good seedbox service is cheaper than Netflix, and I think most of them will let you stream your downloads directly (you can set the seedbox as a media source in Kodi). All you need is a cheap Android TV box, Walmart sells a decent one for twenty bucks. [walmart.com]
You never quite know what you are going to get and it's a pain in the ass when compared to "on demand".
I've found paid streaming to be the opposite. You generally have to subscribe to a bunch of difference services, because no single service has the rights to everything. Piracy always gets you exactly what you wanted to watch.
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Pirated content was always an inconvenience and still mostly is.
A good seedbox service is cheaper than Netflix, and I think most of them will let you stream your downloads directly (you can set the seedbox as a media source in Kodi). All you need is a cheap Android TV box, Walmart sells a decent one for twenty bucks. [walmart.com]
You never quite know what you are going to get and it's a pain in the ass when compared to "on demand".
I've found paid streaming to be the opposite. You generally have to subscribe to a bunch of difference services, because no single service has the rights to everything. Piracy always gets you exactly what you wanted to watch.
I have a kodi box, but you have to understand, this is beyond the skill set and inclination of a vast majority of subscribers.
My wife is exceptionally clever, but if I asked her "can you set up a Linux based mini computer that automatically finds content via torrents and has a built in VPN", I think I know what her answer would be.
You are looking at this from a niche market perspective.
Average users, when faced with soaring costs of streaming services and getting sick of them, will probably just swap conten
I had access (Score:2)
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My son gave me his Netflix credentials because I don't subscribe to any streaming service. He encouraged me to "check it out" to see if I would be interested in getting Netflix. I "checked it out" and was underwhelmed with the offers. This was about a year ago and I have not used his credentials since. The interface was clunky and confusing and the selection of shows was very poor in my opinion.
I recently shut down my Netflix subscription after a long time, keeping my dvd.com subscription as the choices are better. I'd say about ten years ago everything you described was better. I could find a lot of interesting shows I'd never seen using their interface. Now I have a hard time scanning through content and what is provided might give me one in 10 shows I might consider, if I'm lucky. Not sure how things got so much worse, though I think a big part is all of the new streaming companies that wan
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The DVD by mail subscriptions are not what they used to be. They've closed lots of the receiving / shipping DVD centers so now it takes almost a full week, sometimes longer (if you mail out on a Saturday or near a holiday, for example) between us mailing a DVD and getting the new one. So it works pretty well if you only want 3 movies a month. And it seems now the wait times for new releases are much higher than the once were.
We mostly tend to get tv shows and watch them over the course of a few days. Our two disk plan is still grandfathered so much cheaper than buying DVDs, possibly even used ones, so we usually have a disk or two at home any time. May change if we run out of shows we want to rent, but works for now. Definitely not as good as it used to be, but gone less down hill than netflix I feel like.
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What do you use instead?
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Tmi (Score:2)
I ain't sharing it!
"Boy, your brother sure likes lesbian romance movies, with long, slow sexual tension build up and a final explosive release!"
"What can I say? He likes the art form."
share holders (Score:2)
Netflix is a publicly traded company. The board needs more return for the shareholders. They are close to saturating the market, so of course new subscriptions are slowing down. Netflix can up their subscription fees or go after people who share credentials. I'm not saying I like what they're doing.
In other news (Score:2)
Study finds that 2/3 of Netflix subscribers are liars.
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Let's raise the percentage! (Score:2)
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I like the collective approach!
My password is hunter2 My girlfriend's password is * * * * * * *
that's why netflix has multiple plans (Score:2)
https://help.netflix.com/en/no... [netflix.com]
Basic $10/mo 1 device
Standard $15.50/mo 2 concurrent devices
Premium $20/mo 4 concurrent devices
I have the premium and all my kids have access, which is what it's for.
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Because Netflix is for reasons that a lot of us really can't grasp, being nonsensical in nature, is making it a topic for discussion.
I posted this the other day. I think they are going make a lot more subscribers unhappy and drive them to defecting with this; rather than pickup additional subscriptions / revenue.
Because you are correct they already have tiered pricing to address the password sharing. I'd love to see what the break down of tiers is where they suspect extra-househould sharing is happening.
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Netflix vs Netflix (Score:2)
This tweet [twitter.com] has aged well...
We share everything. (Score:2)
Netflix
Prime
Disney+
YouTube Premium.
The only thing I don't share is Curiosity Stream, since I have more respect for their creators.
Between those four mainstream providers, plus add one for Amazon Prime, including StackTV, my streaming bill is quickly approaching what cable would cost but with the benefit of no commercials and significantly better content.
We share everything. (Score:2)
Netflix
Prime
Disney+
YouTube Premium.
The only thing I don't share is Curiosity Stream, since I have more respect for their creators.
Between those four mainstream providers, plus add one for Amazon Prime, including StackTV, my streaming bill is quickly approaching what cable would cost but with the benefit of no commercials and significan8 better content.
I'm still asking this question.... (Score:1)
If I pay for three screens, why should Netflix give a crap where those three screens are? If I'm only sharing my password with my immediate family, they should not give a crap either. This is nothing short of a cash grab now that there are many more streamers competing for my $15/month.
When did underpants gnomes start working at Netflix?
Our au-pair (Score:1)
3 years ago a new au-pair came to stay with us.
While she was staying with us, she logged her boyfriend's Netflix account into our fire stick.
When she left us, 2 years ago, she didn't log it out.
It is still logged in.
I never met her boyfriend, but if I ever do I can say, "Thanks for all the movies" while I hand him a beer.
So much energy expended (Score:1)
... to make sitting on your ass cheaper.
This is just dumb (Score:2)
That's not what Netflix wants. They want p