Netflix adds 13.1 million subscribers, tops revenue estimates

That proves their recent moves are not perceived by people as unfair, contrary to what "the common web" said

Yeah I guess. It's very shocking to me, but people have spoken...
- You can't trust people. People listen to Cold Play and voted for the Nazi Party.
- Because they made the cost of adding a household less than the cost of two accounts, then banked on the fact that people wouldn't want to "screw over" whoever they were sharing a password with. It was a good business strategy, if shitty consumer practice.
I'd agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.
- It just proves that avergae people want their TV and don't give a fuck about how much it costs.
  My wife is a perfect example: We leached off my mom's Netflix for years. I don't really care, we have Plex that I manage and Netflix blows, so it's all her. Mom ended up cancelling with the latest price hike. Brother and I took bets. My wife lasted 36 hours before making her own account. I lost my bet.
People will pay for things that they perceive to be unfair deals.
Didn’t read the article but I wonder how many people will now sub for a short period and cancel.
Like say you have a group of 3 and 1 person subbing indefinitely before and now there might be 3 people subbing for 2-3 months each. For a period of a year that’d be 12 months vs about 9 months.
So right now they might have increased their subs and revenue but it might change over a longer period of time? Or maybe people are just too lazy and will keep their subs. Who knows.
They upset and turned away people who were not willing to pay. Not a big loss. In the meantime they added tons of people who would pay if given a small push.
I have never really been sure how exactly “the internet” thought they would be punished for this move. It seemed kind of bullet proof to me. Like, sure you’re leaving and never coming back, but you were not really a paying customer and never would be.
This doesn't prove anything. Netflix can project whatever they want. It takes time for their shitty decisions to affect them.
How many of these subscribers are bundles and in emerging markets? Netflix doesn't reveal such details.

Fucking weak. People are just begging to be screwed.

And yet this is 2 posts down from an article about their price hikes and increase in ads coming up.

I guess people love that shit... \o/
Am I on glue? I could have sworn the quarterly earnings call results were abysmal. Like quarter over quarter their revenue has tanked.
- No. They've lost subscribers several times, but always in reaction to price hikes.
  When you increase your prices 20% and lose 5% of your subscribers what you've done is reduce bandwidth costs while massively increasing profits.
  And the crackdown on account sharing has been massively successful for them. If zero people had paid for new accounts their profits still would have gone up from their savings in bandwidth and processing. But then tons of people bit the bullet and started paying.

Growth of a few million subscribers is nothing for a company the size of Netflix and there could be all sorts of creative accounting going on.

Executives patting themselves in the back to justify bonuses is self serving bullshit. Quality and value build long term brand profitability but that is too hard for MBAs. Cost cutting and screwing customers is all they know. In a few years people will be asking what the fuck happened to Netflix.

I was a relatively early adopter of Netflix before it was available in my country and used it via VPN back when Netflix had more to gain by allowing that. They made some interesting shows that justified the very affordable price. Now there is more content and most is crap. I rotated subscriptions for the last year but I am hard out now. And ad supported tiers don't fix it for me because I would rather eat shit than watch them.

They want you to eventually pay more and watch ads. It's their long-term goal.
I also doubt the numbers and wonder if they're outright lying just to boost stock (which is working apparently)

Ugh... Hate to see this

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. Many people are too lazy to pirate and the alternative services are also pricy now. Cable and satellite companies did the same stuff before streaming, and most people were too hooked on the product to abandon it.

The comments in a Reddit and Lemmy post are not indicative of broader behavior. Just because everyone in the comments says they’re bailing, that doesn’t mean Netflix is screwed. This is a bubble.

Many people are too lazy to pirate
This is the most shocking part for me, like, dude, we have it really easy nowadays, if you want to hoard you have plenty of tools, and not to mention you can even automate this (granted, it is not very user friendly but it is the kind of things that doesn't require much maintenance from your side).
Do you want to stream? There are a shit ton of streaming sites for free lol, not to mention the ultimate user friendly way to get a better streaming app on lots of platforms synced across them, Stremio + Torrentio + RD.
This is a bubble.
Yeah, we are in a bubble inside a bubble, I realized about this way back ago when I noticed all these scams selling media on Facebook were getting a lot of attention, like, dude they got those TV shows and movies from the web, and you are there too lol.
With massive businesses in the US, I operate on one very simple assumption: Americans will take anything. Low quality products, price hikes, evil behavior— nearly 100% of the time, it doesn’t matter. Americans will take it lying down.
Very rarely, there will be significant pushback. Usually this leads to a minor walking back, but the thing that was tried will probably be tried again. Among hundreds of “this is now worse” decisions, maybe two or three are actually significantly haltered or occasionally truly stopped every year.
I don’t even really blame them. American consumers have been treated like absolute shit for so long, and the draw of escapism on TV is probably hard to resist.
- Nothing to do with Americans specifically. Netflix gains are worldwide.

This would be strange if Netflix didn't have enough of easily accessible good content.

When after finishing work we want to watch “a movie”, it's much easier to choose a Netflix recommendation than to do a half an hour reasearch online and then wait for the movie to be downloaded.

Now add to this time, energy, and expertise needed for looking up and trying pirating options, figuring out technical aspects, paying for a VPN, doing maintenance… Very few can and are willing to do all that.

Yeah but the problem is, I was watching a lot of really bad movies on Netflix, just because they didn't have anything I wanted to watch. So I was sitting there, feeling bored or annoyed or disgusted by the shit movies... I actually felt depressed by what I watched even!
So I was like... I'm paying for this, and I feel like shit most of the time when watching it.
No more.
- That's fair, if this was your case. No point in paying for something you don't like.
  As much as I hate old titles disappearing, I also enjoy the new content Netflix offers. To each their own, I guess.
The people who don't know how I understand completely. But honestly people who have the know-how are underestimating how easy it has got. I can torrent a movie at a much higher quality than Netflix will even stream to my PC and do it all within 5 minutes.
- Now imagine you have a family that likes to watch TV in the living room and not in your room.
But does Netflix even have good movies? Like I think it'd be easier to do exactly that but on HBO Max or Disney Plus, or a TV show on Hulu.
Weird. I can find and download a movie in a couple of minutes. It's almost as easy as learning how to download and navigate Netflix.
Pirating movies has never been easier, but wait there's more, you can just stream them for free too.
There's even places you can buy a box for a one time fee, and have all channels and services free. Or get a subscription that offers every service and channel on earth.
It's so easy my 80 yr old father can do it.
There's no maintenance, no technical expertise needed, you don't even need a VPN.
The only thing Netflix really offers is convenience and legality.
Eh, you don't need to do all that. But I also have the same problem with the research stuff even if I use Netflix. A lot of the recommendations are not great for me, and low quality stuff. Once in a while something good will pop up though.
Usually I write down recommendations people give me in conversation then I refer back to that list when I'm looking for something to watch. If it's not on Netflix, well...
For me it's usually hear about a few things that could be interesting throughout the day and download them while I shower after work. A 5gb movie comes through in a few minutes so I don't even feel it. It's usually 2 or 3 at a time, and since I'd still be going in blind on Netflix recs, it doesn't seem much worse.

We have 6 streaming services at home. Most of them have one or two accounts, meaning they were never used. We are five and most of us are well versed in traversing the seas and with the exception of my father, we all understand spoken and written English pretty well. Whenever I bring the "Why don't we drop off A, B and C that are not being used right now" to the table, they all react badly. I dont understand.

I see two approaches that you can take.
instead of focusing on what you are taking away. Focus on what you can do with the money instead. Telling them that they can have a new TV with that money is a lot more motivation to say yes than taking something away.
Do the scream test. Just cancel everything and wait for someone to scream about not having a services and resubscribe. Repeat every 6 months or so.
Set up a plex or Jellyfin server that your dad could use

Shame on those customers.

Maybe this is the people telling the other competitors to fuck off with their own streaming services. Maybe they think staying loyal to just one of them, things can go back to resemble how it was +5 years ago.

I don't think any company that becomes shit ever goes back to being not shit again...
- Oh, well. In general, I agree, but there must be examples that don't fit with your statement. In the end, companies pursue profit, ideally, offering a better service gives you exactly that. I know this rarely is the case, but it can happen.
- Arguably MS has become less shit over the last decade. But yes.

Yeah, but they don't mention how many they lost during price uprising, so I'd say it somehow equals.

I've been cycling through them a few months at a time. When it gets harder and harder to find something interesting on, say, Netflix, I cancel and sign up for, say, HBO, then a few months later Disney+, rinse and repeat.

I refuse to pay for more than one at a time because I'm not watching more than one at a time. And when I go back to any of them after many months away, there will be new programmes in their catalogue.

I used to do that but it's also frustrating, because when something new comes out, it's just random luck if I'm on the right streaming service to watch it. Otherwise I have to wait...
Wasn't this supposed to be as good or better than the video rental store, where they had everything in one place?

Stremio + Torrentio .

I would guess the perception is that its still the best streaming service.

Also the crackdown in account sharing is helping.

One way I have reduced my subscriptions is by using control d. I know vpns are popular on lemmy but I found it an annoying to have to have a vpn for each device I wanted to bypass a country lock. Moreover it was annoyyng for some devices like apple tv that does not support a vpn. Establishing a vpn on the firewall broke other services that I needed to work locally in my country.

Control d on the other hand is a dns proxy tunnel so you just alter the dns on the devices you want to use it, and in their control panel you can have different countries per service - so if you browse youtube that can go via a country that does not allow ads. Bbc iplayer can be told to go via uk and so on. This is a lot more convenient and allows you to retain your country for all services except the ones you want to tunnel.

For the annoyance, you could just use some open source firewall like opnsense to create a site to site to your VPN provider and route anything destined for your shady services through it.
- Yes I do use opnsense and it was more annoying than control d. I tried both options.
Thanks for this tip. I hadn’t heard about this before, and it sounds like an interesting thing to add to my tool chest.
so if you browse youtube that can go via a country that does not allow ads.
Can you tell me more about this? I’ve never heard about that this is a thing, and it sounds like a good thing to known
- Set your country to Albania, Moldova, or Myanmar and you wont get ads on youtube.

A lot of it is familiarity. I begged my parents to cancel Netflix, especially since they complain about the programming (or lack thereof); I pointed out that they could try another streaming service for a month, and then if they really hated it, then they could just go back to Netflix. But they wouldn't even entertain the possibility. They're afraid of change.

And Netflix is making bank on that.

Their competition sucks big ass, too. I guess branding matters in this case. For example, once you watched the classic HBO TV series (The Sopranos, The Wire…), you don't need it anymore. The others have even less going on.

I’m confused by this password debacle. I am on my brother’s (US) family plan, but I’ve been living abroad the whole time. Nothing has changed for me at all. Does this mean there are some exemptions, that the crackdown just hasn’t hit my brother yet, or that he’s paying more now on my behalf without my knowing?

Netflix does let you add "guest" users in different households now, although It could be it just hasn't hit you yet. When they announced the password crackdown it stopped Netflix working in my second household, but we just logged out and in and we haven't been "blocked" since.
It seems for the initial debacle they blocked loads of accounts but I don't know how often they do a ban wave or if they just figured the original announcement would get more people to buy subscription's (which seems to have worked).

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 cancelled around the time the password policy changed. I found less and less compelling shows to watch and the old favorites like the office moved on to other services.

It's a bummer they aren't facing consequences for their price hikes and other shenanigans .

I guess someone else is paying for our cancelled subs now. Hope they enjoy their shitty service.
I've been waiting to get hit with it so I can finally cancel but for whatever reason it's kept working. Feels like ok value with it split over 5/6 people. It's supposedly rolled out here in nordics but no one's had issues.
Yep it's disappointing that they aren't getting punished for their bullshit. They'll never get any money from me anyways.

We have a free subscription through our home fibre bundle.

Well Netflix is still the best streaming service when you think about the price and the content.

I was just a price hike away from resigning but it never happened.

In Switzerland there are also a lot of streaming services which haven’t arrived yet.

And we’re still sharing our account with my mom who lives 15 kilometers away from us.

In Switzerland pirating is also legal, so I know what I do :)