Netflix’s Password Sharing Cash Grab Finally Arrives In The States
After years of saying password sharing wasn't really a big deal and was akin to free advertising, Netflix recently announced it would be cracking down on password sharing. It started with a new trial in the global south where users were nagged until they paid an additional fee if they shared their password with users outside of their home.
Now, those efforts are poised to finally arrive in the U.S. in March according to the Netflix website. Company co-CEO Greg Peters acknowledged on a conference call that the move isn't likely to be popular with consumers, who've already been faced with several instances of flat price hikes:
This will not be a universally popular move, so there will be current members that are unhappy with this move. We'll see a bit of a cancel reaction to that," Greg Peters, Neflix's recently promoted co-CEO, told investors on a call last week.
There are numerous problems here.
One, Netflix spent years conditioning its users to believe that password sharing was not only good, but encouraged. Two, Netflix just got done imposing numerous price hikes on existing customers, while service quality has, for many, notably deteriorated. Three, Netflix already technically charges its users more money to increase the number of allowed simultaneous streams per account.
Four, the company's implementation of the password sharing crackdown in the global South has so far been a confusing mess. Five, the company is making its service more expensive and annoying at a time when its facing increased competition. Six, the folks (like Adobe) promising Netflix a big boost in income from the move don't appear to be basing their projections on reality.
It's certainly not going to be the end of Netflix if it begins increasingly nickel-and-diming its customers with additional surcharges (just like the cable giants it once disrupted), but it's certainly not going to meaningfully help a company that's facing increased competition from a rotating crop of streaming services which can now differentiate themselves by... not being annoying.
Netflix clearly transitioned from innovative market disruptor to turf protection in the last few years, and in the process it's slowly but surely turning into Comcast. And it's doing it because the company's global growth has become saturated, and Wall Street demands its quarter over quarter growth at any cost. That cost, as usual, is going to be paid by the end user, whether they like it or not.
And if they don't like it, they're going to shift over to a growing number of alternative streaming services (including free ones like TikTok) that don't nag the hell out of you because your friends or kids never wanted to pay for a subscription in the first place.