Much like the up and down seen in Warner Bros. Since the Discovery merger or Disney switching Bobs with Chapek for Iger, Netflix has had a roller coaster of a 2022 and it’s not looking to slow down anytime in 2023 either. The latest news was about the streamer most famous for Stranger Things cracking down on password sharing by concocting a plan where users would have to babysit their accounts and log in every month—but no more, says Netflix.
The Streamable ran a piece about Netflix and their backpedaling, trying to reverse a wave of outrage from consumers who enjoy setting and forgetting their accounts, not watching them monthly. Netflix proved it’s as much like any other entertainment giant with its internals getting leaked to the public and messy decisions being made openly, making them just like Disney or Warner Bros.
A spate of cancellations put the streamer on the downward slope, being the number one streamer almost entirely on the back of Stranger Things (almost all the rest of Netflix’s top series were other network’s reruns) put them back on the upward one. The latest news out of the House That Killed Blockbuster was that the streamer planned to crack down on password sharing to try to shore itself up and one method was going to be making users log in every month which upset students, travelers, almost everybody who wanted to keep their accounts the way they were. After a lot of outrage, the streamer is pulling the classic, “Just kidding!” Defense.
The streamer, fretting endlessly about password sharing even while producing game shows that are actually injuring their contestants and cheating the outcomes, has begun backpedaling in earnest on their password sharing measures, now trying to clarify that they’re only being done in Chile, Peru, and Costa Rica, possibly to see what kind of pushback they get before they whip out a series of new rules for users simply trying to watch Stranger Things in America.
This type of Big Brother behavior from a streaming service most famous for letting users not sleep through endless episodes playing back to back with their “Are you still watching?” Feature nannying them makes a twisted sort of sense. Netflix is now attempting the same thing on an industrial scale, but the idea of having to log in every month in order to combat password sharing—say a couple that’s broken up but still use the same account in their various apartments—is irritating to those caught in the crossfire of the streamer trying to shore up their profit loss. It’s the type of thing that hurts more people than those few rule breakers: college kids gone for school, business people on trips that keep from their scheduled login date, and so forth. Aside from being plain annoying for the rest of their userbase.
Source: The Streamable