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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.