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Television

One-Third Of US Netflix Subscribers Admit They Share Their Passwords, Survey Finds (deadline.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
About one-third of U.S. subscribers to Netflix share their login credentials with others, according to new data from Leichtman Research Group. From the report: The research firm's online survey of 4,400 consumers confirms the company's own conclusions in recent years. While 64% of respondents said they pay for and use Netflix only in their own household, 33% indicate some form of sharing. (The remaining 3% are households whose Netflix comes packaged via other subscriptions.) Netflix has about 74 million subscribers in the U.S. and Canada and has penetrated nearly 70% of U.S. broadband homes. With subscription growth flattening in the region of late, Netflix has recently phased in rate increases in order to continue funding its $18 billion in annual programming spending. Earlier this month, Netflix announced a test of monthly fees for password-sharing in three territories outside of the U.S. The rise of password sharing between households, a blog post explained, is âoeimpacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.â
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One-Third Of US Netflix Subscribers Admit They Share Their Passwords, Survey Finds More

One-Third Of US Netflix Subscribers Admit They Share Their Passwords, Survey Finds

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  • My GF and I share our streaming accounts, I use her Netflix, and she uses my Prime video.
    We recently decided that Netflix was no longer worthwhile for us. So she will be cancelling, and this is before they started talking about cracking down on sharing. If they crack down on shared accounts, suddenly it seems even less appealing.
    We were thinking about cycling her account through a few different streaming services, a couple of months at a time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      I canceled my Netflix account because I ran out of new content to watch. Maybe Netflix should be focusing on fixing that "issue" instead of raising prices and cracking down on password sharing.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AvitarX ( 172628 )

        They spend more on content than any other company.

        They're just not good at curating it IMO.

      • I canceled my Netflix account because I ran out of new content to watch. Maybe Netflix should be focusing on fixing that "issue" instead of raising prices and cracking down on password sharing.

        Fair enough. There are so many streaming services producing so much content, one needs to pick and choose.

        At the same time, I don't really want to pay between $7.99 and $70 per month to Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, HBO, Peacock, Fubo, PBS, and whoever pops up this week. Some of them I only watch once in a blue moon. I'm sure many people feel the same and share.

        What I kind of wonder about is the definition of "household". I'd love to see how much people stretch this. My kids are in and out of my house and

    • My GF and I share our streaming accounts, I use her Netflix, and she uses my Prime video. We recently decided that Netflix was no longer worthwhile for us. So she will be cancelling, and this is before they started talking about cracking down on sharing. If they crack down on shared accounts, suddenly it seems even less appealing. We were thinking about cycling her account through a few different streaming services, a couple of months at a time.

      I'm guessing that is a relatively common occurrence - especially amongst friends/family living in the same area so it's harder to geolocate shared users. VPNs add to the problem of geolocating. Even 2 streams at once, with different IPS in my house would be an ATV and iPad on my cell plan.

  • Everytime I sign into netflix I am presented with a dialog box nagging me for my phone number and telling me it's required for account recovery and if I don't give it to them, I might lose access. They can go ahead and cancel my account because they're not getting my phone number.

  • ... and the other two-thirds are lying about it

    • Truth.

    • My house doesn't share with anyone outside the house. I don't know that 2/3rds of people have the same stance, but I gotta think there are more individuals and single-house Netflix accounts than you'd imagine. I and my wife aren't that unique in any other way, I can't think we'd be unique in this.

      • And there is some incentive to not just hand it out to people on the street, since there is a maximum number of concurrent streams per login, isn't there?

        • I haven't checked that in a while, but I know there used to be tiers based on how many concurrent streams you want to be able to watch "in the house."

        • And there is some incentive to not just hand it out to people on the street, since there is a maximum number of concurrent streams per login, isn't there?

          It's this concurrent streams limit that allows them to charge $5 per month per other household you gave your password to.

  • Make family plans affordable (Score:3)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Wednesday March 30, 2022 @12:28PM (#62403071)

    Much like piracy you are dealing with people who will not pay for a full price subscription if they couldn't access via a shared password so don't bother looking at is as losing that $15 a month and maybe you could make an extra $3 a month if you offered a cheap way to add users to a single account. Maybe set the limit on 1 extra IP address or external user to prevent widespread abuse

    Also Netflix is the prime example of the issues with business looking for just infinite growth. Maybe just settle on having a maximum of 60-80 millions subscribers and build a budget around maintaining that while making a decent margin off the top. Maybe expecting subscriber growth year after year after year is untenable. Maybe you can build a company off making a steady, maintainable profit and not have to make all the profit all the time, but I understand the "shareholders" simply cannot accept that and thus it will probably lead to negative outcomes for Netflix over time.

    • Infinite growth is required to have a non-zero stock price. A non-zero stock price is required to issue bonds and avoid hostile takeover, the higher the market cap the cheaper it is to borrow. The cheaper it is to borrow the easier it is to grow and avoid hostile takeover. Any company that doesn't grow will be taken over or driven out of business by one that does grow. Thus, the aim of ever increasing profits is a law of capital markets for any exchange listed business or that doesn't have a physical monopo

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        What are you smoking; there are lots of business that have a non-zero stock price and very real caps on potential expansion.

        You don't have to have some unlimited growth potential to be investable. However it is true that you have to be 1) profitable
        2) sustainable in terms of market cap, and margin

        There are plenty of stable companies that people happily hold shares in so as to collect dividends.

        As usually the people complaining about capitalism and markets understand fuck all about them - what a surprise.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      Much like piracy you are dealing with people who will not pay for a full price subscription if they couldn't access via a shared password so don't bother looking at is as losing that $15 a month...

      That's just as accurate as companies claiming every single act of piracy is a lost sale. Of course there are going to be people willing to pay for Netflix if they lose an account that belonged to some one else. The question is how many will sign up and how many will do without and if Netflix has even half a brain they have people whose job it is to determine whether the company would benefit from cutting the sharers off or not.

      This is probably why they havent taken steps to stop the practice up until now de

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Much like piracy you are dealing with people who will not pay for a full price subscription if they couldn't access via a shared password so don't bother looking at is as losing that $15 a month and maybe you could make an extra $3 a month if you offered a cheap way to add users to a single account. Maybe set the limit on 1 extra IP address or external user to prevent widespread abuse

      That A. doesn't prevent widespread abuse, because people could just get a shared VPN, and B. creates major headaches for actual customers, because people who live in the same household do not share an IP address on their mobile devices.

      If Netflix weren't available on your phone, that might be a plausible approach, but....

  • I know people during last fall called netflix to cancel and they were told to share an account with a friend to reduce costs by netflix reps. It makes sense, those who quit can lower their price and netflix gets free marketing and one less subscription canceled. Later on I'll bet netflix will tighten their grip and either raise their prices or force subscriptions to improve their revenue.

    • Iâ(TM)m sure thatâ(TM)s because the customer service reps are rewarded for each subscriber they retain. Im sure their bonus or continued employment is dependent on how many times they can talk someone out of cancelling service.

    • Later on I'll bet netflix will tighten their grip and either raise their prices or force subscriptions to improve their revenue.

      Too late. They just raised their prices (over $20/mo for 4k) which made me quit it. Too many other alternatives and not enough time.

  • Because 1.1 Billion a month isn't enough to cover costs for the service + production. >.>

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tgeek ( 941867 )
      Um yeah, 12 * $1.1b is less than $18b (the reported costs of programming). Now whether or not $18b is a reasonable cost for the content they produce/acquire is another debate . . .

  • I don't share any of my various accounts. But if they are checking by location/IP addresses, I have enough houses to put myself on numerous shit-lists.

    • I don't share any of my various accounts. But if they are checking by location/IP addresses, I have enough houses to put myself on numerous shit-lists.

      I have smart phone for every adult household member, an iPod for every minor household member at least 5 years old, plus 2 TVs. Only the TVs are stationary, so I don't know if we'll be flagged for streaming on our smart phones during out of state summer road trips.

  • Netflix and other streaming video services, need to play a careful pricing game here.

    If they up the ante too much, in terms of cracking down on password sharing or by increasing subscription cost too much, then end users will just go back to old ways - pirated content.

    The same applies to starting to introduce advertising to paying users - and introducing "tiers" - nope, they haven't done that yet, but I'm sure there's some bean counters and marketing types chomping at the bit to increase revenue in this man

    • Pirated content was always an inconvenience and still mostly is.

      A good seedbox service is cheaper than Netflix, and I think most of them will let you stream your downloads directly (you can set the seedbox as a media source in Kodi). All you need is a cheap Android TV box, Walmart sells a decent one for twenty bucks. [walmart.com]

      You never quite know what you are going to get and it's a pain in the ass when compared to "on demand".

      I've found paid streaming to be the opposite. You generally have to subscribe to a bunch of difference services, because no single service has the rights to everything. Piracy always gets you exactly what you wanted to watch.

      • Pirated content was always an inconvenience and still mostly is.

        A good seedbox service is cheaper than Netflix, and I think most of them will let you stream your downloads directly (you can set the seedbox as a media source in Kodi). All you need is a cheap Android TV box, Walmart sells a decent one for twenty bucks. [walmart.com]

        You never quite know what you are going to get and it's a pain in the ass when compared to "on demand".

        I've found paid streaming to be the opposite. You generally have to subscribe to a bunch of difference services, because no single service has the rights to everything. Piracy always gets you exactly what you wanted to watch.

        I have a kodi box, but you have to understand, this is beyond the skill set and inclination of a vast majority of subscribers.
        My wife is exceptionally clever, but if I asked her "can you set up a Linux based mini computer that automatically finds content via torrents and has a built in VPN", I think I know what her answer would be.

        You are looking at this from a niche market perspective.

        Average users, when faced with soaring costs of streaming services and getting sick of them, will probably just swap conten

  • My son gave me his Netflix credentials because I don't subscribe to any streaming service. He encouraged me to "check it out" to see if I would be interested in getting Netflix. I "checked it out" and was underwhelmed with the offers. This was about a year ago and I have not used his credentials since. The interface was clunky and confusing and the selection of shows was very poor in my opinion.

    • My son gave me his Netflix credentials because I don't subscribe to any streaming service. He encouraged me to "check it out" to see if I would be interested in getting Netflix. I "checked it out" and was underwhelmed with the offers. This was about a year ago and I have not used his credentials since. The interface was clunky and confusing and the selection of shows was very poor in my opinion.

      I recently shut down my Netflix subscription after a long time, keeping my dvd.com subscription as the choices are better. I'd say about ten years ago everything you described was better. I could find a lot of interesting shows I'd never seen using their interface. Now I have a hard time scanning through content and what is provided might give me one in 10 shows I might consider, if I'm lucky. Not sure how things got so much worse, though I think a big part is all of the new streaming companies that wan

      • The DVD by mail subscriptions are not what they used to be. They've closed lots of the receiving / shipping DVD centers so now it takes almost a full week, sometimes longer (if you mail out on a Saturday or near a holiday, for example) between us mailing a DVD and getting the new one. So it works pretty well if you only want 3 movies a month. And it seems now the wait times for new releases are much higher than the once were.

        • The DVD by mail subscriptions are not what they used to be. They've closed lots of the receiving / shipping DVD centers so now it takes almost a full week, sometimes longer (if you mail out on a Saturday or near a holiday, for example) between us mailing a DVD and getting the new one. So it works pretty well if you only want 3 movies a month. And it seems now the wait times for new releases are much higher than the once were.

          We mostly tend to get tv shows and watch them over the course of a few days. Our two disk plan is still grandfathered so much cheaper than buying DVDs, possibly even used ones, so we usually have a disk or two at home any time. May change if we run out of shows we want to rent, but works for now. Definitely not as good as it used to be, but gone less down hill than netflix I feel like.

    • What do you use instead?

      • I have a very large collection of movies and television shows on DVD. I rip my DVDs to NAS and then use Kodi to access them via my custom HTPC. Hell, you can get used DVD movies and TV series box sets for next to nothing at local yard sales.

  • I ain't sharing it!

    "Boy, your brother sure likes lesbian romance movies, with long, slow sexual tension build up and a final explosive release!"

    "What can I say? He likes the art form."

  • Study finds that 2/3 of Netflix subscribers are liars.

  • Everyone post your password here!
  • Why is this a topic of discussion? Netflix has multiple price tiers specifically FOR shared "accounts", which by definition is shared passwords.
    https://help.netflix.com/en/no... [netflix.com]
    Basic $10/mo 1 device
    Standard $15.50/mo 2 concurrent devices
    Premium $20/mo 4 concurrent devices
    I have the premium and all my kids have access, which is what it's for.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DarkOx ( 621550 )

      Because Netflix is for reasons that a lot of us really can't grasp, being nonsensical in nature, is making it a topic for discussion.

      I posted this the other day. I think they are going make a lot more subscribers unhappy and drive them to defecting with this; rather than pickup additional subscriptions / revenue.

      Because you are correct they already have tiered pricing to address the password sharing. I'd love to see what the break down of tiers is where they suspect extra-househould sharing is happening.

    • But they won't sell me what I want, which is at least HD, possibly even 4K, but with only one device. I live alone; I don't need two or four screens. Give me HD or 4K for the basic price and I'd stay subscribed. Instead, I subscribe for maybe a month and then drop it after letting a number of things I want to watch get onto the service.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      This is where I'm at with it. I pay for 4 devices. It's not of their damn business where those devices are or who they belong to. (Yes, I understand that it's their service they can dictate how I use it. If they want to lose my business over my daughter using one of those screens while she's away at college, that's their prerogative.)

  • This tweet [twitter.com] has aged well...

  • Netflix
    Prime
    Disney+
    YouTube Premium.

    The only thing I don't share is Curiosity Stream, since I have more respect for their creators.

    Between those four mainstream providers, plus add one for Amazon Prime, including StackTV, my streaming bill is quickly approaching what cable would cost but with the benefit of no commercials and significantly better content.

  • Netflix
    Prime
    Disney+
    YouTube Premium.

    The only thing I don't share is Curiosity Stream, since I have more respect for their creators.

    Between those four mainstream providers, plus add one for Amazon Prime, including StackTV, my streaming bill is quickly approaching what cable would cost but with the benefit of no commercials and significan8 better content.

  • If I pay for three screens, why should Netflix give a crap where those three screens are? If I'm only sharing my password with my immediate family, they should not give a crap either. This is nothing short of a cash grab now that there are many more streamers competing for my $15/month.

    When did underpants gnomes start working at Netflix?

  • 3 years ago a new au-pair came to stay with us.
    While she was staying with us, she logged her boyfriend's Netflix account into our fire stick.
    When she left us, 2 years ago, she didn't log it out.
    It is still logged in.
    I never met her boyfriend, but if I ever do I can say, "Thanks for all the movies" while I hand him a beer.

  • ... to make sitting on your ass cheaper.

  • If Netflix wanted people to not share their account, they would simply log out the first stream when a second from a different IP address logs in. I.e, no multiple streams from different locations. They provide a means of adding additional logins to legit family members at different locations with a shared account at additional cost. A 2-factor text message scheme with a shot time out could be used to allow a legit family member to authorize an additional stream.

    That's not what Netflix wants. They want p

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