Yeah, I thought we had figured this out after Twitter. Or Reddit.
FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we’re still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I’m certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it’s used rarely enough in one of them that it’s never been an issue).
The big thing that I did was to go back to physical media and home streaming. Boycotts won’t work, but that? That might. At least it’ll make it less likely for physical media to be fully eliminated as an option.
I would have to sanity check that math, honestly. I am so sporadically in so many of my media subs that if we counted by watched items as opposed to all items you get access to it may break even.
That said, I’d be lying if I said I don’t have BluRays still shrink-wrapped that I haven’t watched, so I guess it does cut both ways.
For music it’s cut and dry. In 2004 I was spending somewhere between 15 and 25 bucks for a an album on CD which might have 1 or 2 discs. I was buying something like 2 to 4 albums a month. How is it possible today you can pay a monthly sub of a single cd 15 years ago and just have unlimited access to all music. That is insane to me. I still buy albums on vinyl a lot, but keep my spotify for convenience and discovery purposes.
I am pretty sure back then when I purchased the box set of band of brothers on DVD around the same period it cost something like 60 to 80 bucks for 10 1 hour episodes and extra. Max today costs 10 bucks a month today.
With music it gets weirder because for some reason we’ve all accepted that anybody can just upload music to Youtube as long as they’re fine with whoever owns the rights reclaiming the ad revenue, which is very weird.
But in any case I think the value calculation gets a bit weird for a number of reasons. TV was indeed overpriced in physical media, but movies were a different story. It’s gonna depend on your consumption habits, but I can tell you there’s no way my average viewing on each of the services I pay for at 15 bucks a pop (not ten anymore on any of them, unless you’re ok with also watching ads) is anywhere close to one movie or five episodes on average. Across the whole lot, maybe, for each individual one? Probably not. Across the whole household… maybe.
Second, a lot of the media consumption was not made physically at the time, either, TV was a thing (and depending on the time period a source of home recordings, which are also fair game). But then those options haven’t been technically removed, I guess, so… I don’t know, it’s hard to calculate.
Which I guess is part of why these services are so resilient. It’s hard to figure out if you’re over or underpaying relative to the alternatives, and since there’s no way to grasp the core cost or value of what you’re getting intuitively it’s hard to understand if they’re priced reasonably, either. Netflix was doing this at a loss in that “disruptor start up” style that broke the 2010s that who knows what entertainment should cost at this point.
May I ask why? If you are paying the full sub yourself, but the person you kindly share the sub with gets cut off, why would you stop paying? If you enjoy the content and service for the price, why does it matter if you lose the ability to share if you are the only one footing the bill.
This is such a weird take. I mean, either I am sharing the bill (I’m not), and the cutting off is rising my price or I… you know, actually like the person using the sub when I’m not and I’m still mad that they are getting cut off. Plus who’s to say I’m the primary user? For all I know I’m in there way less than the other person.
It’s weird to assume that I would only be annoyed at my own inconvenience and not by the inconvenience of someone else. Plus in practice the outcome would have to be paying their cut-down “second account” nonsense and paying more myself, it’d be kinda petty otherwise.
FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we’re still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I’m certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it’s used rarely enough in one of them that it’s never been an issue).
You kind of switched between “we” and “I” speak. So I interpreted it as you paying the full sub fee but someone else had access to it. You mentioned that you would not pay for a second sub, but what if you PW sharer was willing to cover just that cost? I feel like there are 2 kinds of PW sharers. Some that PW share as a gift. And others that split the cost for a single account. It’s hard to tell when people say what they (the individual) are willing to pay for in terms of cost if in practice they are splitting the bill.
You are overestimating how much we’re willing to think or talk about this. It may be a cultural thing or a socioeconomic thing, but with media subs being a thing for decades there’s a blob of people where some have each other’s subs, different people are paying for different subs and there are different shares and accesses floating around. Some of the subs come from cable bundles, even.
I’m pretty sure in the extended friends and family group there are multiple bundled subs for some of the same services, some of which may not even be in use because devices are grandfathered into the first one that got acquired.
We really aren’t putting that much collective attention into this problem. People just watch what they have. When a show isn’t in a service the group has access to it just gets ignored. I’m easily the most engaged in the whole thing and even I don’t care that much. So that explains why I’d be making decisions about which tier of Netflix is being paid. I am the one who has paid access to that one, and I’m the one engaged enough to have an opinion. At one point I told the group that Netflix had hiked prices and I had downgraded to the 1080p tier with two screens, in case we hit the screen limit or the location restrictions. Everybody just shrugged, said “eff Netflix” and moved on with their lives. We’ve never hit the limits or been flagged for password sharing.
I’m aware of how media subs work and pw sharing works. But for me, I pay for the subscriptions I want access to. If pw sharing gets cut off, that is a free gift I used to give to other people as a bonus, but it doesn’t impact how I chose which subs I pay for to access the content I watch. That’s why I am curious why the primary sub holder of a service would cancel a sub if there’s a PW share crackdown if they are the sole person paying for it and it’s a subscription they enjoy utilizing.
Again, you’re looking at it wrong. Or weird, at least. It’s like asking why I’d be mad that the brand of cookies a member of my family eats gets a price hike if I don’t like them myself. They’re still in my shopping cart every week.
I don’t have a concept of a “primary sub holder”. It’s stuff a group of people gets for the group, and who is paying for which specific parts of the fixed expenses is lost to the mists of time.
I get that US and anglo cultures in general are less collectivist, but this seems more extreme than that. Surely the concept of a close-knit group of people sharing costs without much precise bookkeeping is not completely alien to you. Do you split grocery shopping with the rest of your household? I mean, I did that when I was sharing an apartment during university, so maybe it’s an age thing?
I am aware of close knit families. But when one family member had cable, we’d just have movie/game/tv watch party with the extended family. Sure, if anyone wanted to have it in their own home independent of the social viewing experience, you could always buy it for your household. And the family members that had the cable package, probably would have kept it even if we didn’t come over to visit and watch a game on ESPN or some other cable TV. PW sharing is fine within the household. It’s when it 's out of the household where the crackdown really happens.
Hey, I wasn’t the one who switched the system to a username and passwod authorization. My “household” isn’t defined by the physical location anymore than their account system is. Friends and family groups don’t work however Netflix wants them to work for monetization purposes. There are blood relations who don’t sleep under the same roof but hang out daily. There are friend groups that share a roof. There are couples who spend weeks at a time apart but still live together.
It’s not my fault that Netflix borked the business model and then tried to walk it back once it lured everybody else to a profit dark hole. I’m not gonna change how my social relationships work for the sake of them having a neat revenue stream with no gray areas.
So no, PW sharing is fine, period, that’s what concurrent screen limits are for. What constitutes a “household” is not for Netflix to define, and I have a social group where some expenses just float around in limbo without a clear attribution or distinction between payers and users. Welcome to existing in real life and having zero time to worry about enshittified late captialist terminally online bullshit, honestly.
Yeah, I thought we had figured this out after Twitter. Or Reddit.
FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we’re still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I’m certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it’s used rarely enough in one of them that it’s never been an issue).
The big thing that I did was to go back to physical media and home streaming. Boycotts won’t work, but that? That might. At least it’ll make it less likely for physical media to be fully eliminated as an option.
Physical media FTW. I wish it was easier to obtain movies and shows physically. I like to own my stuff.
I love physical media but I also know that if I was buying everything I’m watching on Netflix, it would be way more expensive than my subscription.
Still I love buying dvd’s and blurays.
I would have to sanity check that math, honestly. I am so sporadically in so many of my media subs that if we counted by watched items as opposed to all items you get access to it may break even.
That said, I’d be lying if I said I don’t have BluRays still shrink-wrapped that I haven’t watched, so I guess it does cut both ways.
For music it’s cut and dry. In 2004 I was spending somewhere between 15 and 25 bucks for a an album on CD which might have 1 or 2 discs. I was buying something like 2 to 4 albums a month. How is it possible today you can pay a monthly sub of a single cd 15 years ago and just have unlimited access to all music. That is insane to me. I still buy albums on vinyl a lot, but keep my spotify for convenience and discovery purposes.
I am pretty sure back then when I purchased the box set of band of brothers on DVD around the same period it cost something like 60 to 80 bucks for 10 1 hour episodes and extra. Max today costs 10 bucks a month today.
With music it gets weirder because for some reason we’ve all accepted that anybody can just upload music to Youtube as long as they’re fine with whoever owns the rights reclaiming the ad revenue, which is very weird.
But in any case I think the value calculation gets a bit weird for a number of reasons. TV was indeed overpriced in physical media, but movies were a different story. It’s gonna depend on your consumption habits, but I can tell you there’s no way my average viewing on each of the services I pay for at 15 bucks a pop (not ten anymore on any of them, unless you’re ok with also watching ads) is anywhere close to one movie or five episodes on average. Across the whole lot, maybe, for each individual one? Probably not. Across the whole household… maybe.
Second, a lot of the media consumption was not made physically at the time, either, TV was a thing (and depending on the time period a source of home recordings, which are also fair game). But then those options haven’t been technically removed, I guess, so… I don’t know, it’s hard to calculate.
Which I guess is part of why these services are so resilient. It’s hard to figure out if you’re over or underpaying relative to the alternatives, and since there’s no way to grasp the core cost or value of what you’re getting intuitively it’s hard to understand if they’re priced reasonably, either. Netflix was doing this at a loss in that “disruptor start up” style that broke the 2010s that who knows what entertainment should cost at this point.
May I ask why? If you are paying the full sub yourself, but the person you kindly share the sub with gets cut off, why would you stop paying? If you enjoy the content and service for the price, why does it matter if you lose the ability to share if you are the only one footing the bill.
This is such a weird take. I mean, either I am sharing the bill (I’m not), and the cutting off is rising my price or I… you know, actually like the person using the sub when I’m not and I’m still mad that they are getting cut off. Plus who’s to say I’m the primary user? For all I know I’m in there way less than the other person.
It’s weird to assume that I would only be annoyed at my own inconvenience and not by the inconvenience of someone else. Plus in practice the outcome would have to be paying their cut-down “second account” nonsense and paying more myself, it’d be kinda petty otherwise.
You kind of switched between “we” and “I” speak. So I interpreted it as you paying the full sub fee but someone else had access to it. You mentioned that you would not pay for a second sub, but what if you PW sharer was willing to cover just that cost? I feel like there are 2 kinds of PW sharers. Some that PW share as a gift. And others that split the cost for a single account. It’s hard to tell when people say what they (the individual) are willing to pay for in terms of cost if in practice they are splitting the bill.
You are overestimating how much we’re willing to think or talk about this. It may be a cultural thing or a socioeconomic thing, but with media subs being a thing for decades there’s a blob of people where some have each other’s subs, different people are paying for different subs and there are different shares and accesses floating around. Some of the subs come from cable bundles, even.
I’m pretty sure in the extended friends and family group there are multiple bundled subs for some of the same services, some of which may not even be in use because devices are grandfathered into the first one that got acquired.
We really aren’t putting that much collective attention into this problem. People just watch what they have. When a show isn’t in a service the group has access to it just gets ignored. I’m easily the most engaged in the whole thing and even I don’t care that much. So that explains why I’d be making decisions about which tier of Netflix is being paid. I am the one who has paid access to that one, and I’m the one engaged enough to have an opinion. At one point I told the group that Netflix had hiked prices and I had downgraded to the 1080p tier with two screens, in case we hit the screen limit or the location restrictions. Everybody just shrugged, said “eff Netflix” and moved on with their lives. We’ve never hit the limits or been flagged for password sharing.
I’m aware of how media subs work and pw sharing works. But for me, I pay for the subscriptions I want access to. If pw sharing gets cut off, that is a free gift I used to give to other people as a bonus, but it doesn’t impact how I chose which subs I pay for to access the content I watch. That’s why I am curious why the primary sub holder of a service would cancel a sub if there’s a PW share crackdown if they are the sole person paying for it and it’s a subscription they enjoy utilizing.
Again, you’re looking at it wrong. Or weird, at least. It’s like asking why I’d be mad that the brand of cookies a member of my family eats gets a price hike if I don’t like them myself. They’re still in my shopping cart every week.
I don’t have a concept of a “primary sub holder”. It’s stuff a group of people gets for the group, and who is paying for which specific parts of the fixed expenses is lost to the mists of time.
I get that US and anglo cultures in general are less collectivist, but this seems more extreme than that. Surely the concept of a close-knit group of people sharing costs without much precise bookkeeping is not completely alien to you. Do you split grocery shopping with the rest of your household? I mean, I did that when I was sharing an apartment during university, so maybe it’s an age thing?
I am aware of close knit families. But when one family member had cable, we’d just have movie/game/tv watch party with the extended family. Sure, if anyone wanted to have it in their own home independent of the social viewing experience, you could always buy it for your household. And the family members that had the cable package, probably would have kept it even if we didn’t come over to visit and watch a game on ESPN or some other cable TV. PW sharing is fine within the household. It’s when it 's out of the household where the crackdown really happens.
Hey, I wasn’t the one who switched the system to a username and passwod authorization. My “household” isn’t defined by the physical location anymore than their account system is. Friends and family groups don’t work however Netflix wants them to work for monetization purposes. There are blood relations who don’t sleep under the same roof but hang out daily. There are friend groups that share a roof. There are couples who spend weeks at a time apart but still live together.
It’s not my fault that Netflix borked the business model and then tried to walk it back once it lured everybody else to a profit dark hole. I’m not gonna change how my social relationships work for the sake of them having a neat revenue stream with no gray areas.
So no, PW sharing is fine, period, that’s what concurrent screen limits are for. What constitutes a “household” is not for Netflix to define, and I have a social group where some expenses just float around in limbo without a clear attribution or distinction between payers and users. Welcome to existing in real life and having zero time to worry about enshittified late captialist terminally online bullshit, honestly.