This is so strange to me. I guess people enjoy being ripped off and getting less and less value for their money.

  • VodkaSolution @feddit.it
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    11 months ago

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

    • 1984@lemmy.todayOP
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      11 months ago

      Yeah I guess. It’s very shocking to me, but people have spoken…

    • LetMeEatCake@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        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.

    • brrt@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • Pohl@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • shirro@aussie.zone
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • ohlaph@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      They want you to eventually pay more and watch ads. It’s their long-term goal.

    • _sideffect@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I also doubt the numbers and wonder if they’re outright lying just to boost stock (which is working apparently)

  • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • V4sh3r@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I see two approaches that you can take.

      1. 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.
      2. 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.
  • nostradiel@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

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

  • Thief@lemmy.myserv.one
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • WallEx@feddit.de
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    11 months ago

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

    Also the crackdown in account sharing is helping.

  • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • 1984@lemmy.todayOP
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      11 months ago

      I don’t think any company that becomes shit ever goes back to being not shit again…

  • MudMan@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • dandi8@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      Physical media FTW. I wish it was easier to obtain movies and shows physically. I like to own my stuff.

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • MudMan@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • Copernican@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            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.

            • MudMan@kbin.social
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              11 months ago

              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.

  • Eggyhead@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    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?

    • AnomanderRake@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      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).

  • normalexit@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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 .

    • Lad@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      Yep it’s disappointing that they aren’t getting punished for their bullshit. They’ll never get any money from me anyways.

    • Zekas@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • 1984@lemmy.todayOP
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      11 months ago

      I guess someone else is paying for our cancelled subs now. Hope they enjoy their shitty service.

  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • thrawn@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • clgoh@lemmy.ca
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        11 months ago

        Nothing to do with Americans specifically. Netflix gains are worldwide.