Netflix adds 13.1 million subscribers, tops revenue estimates

1984@lemmy.today to Technology@lemmy.world – 315 points –
Netflix adds 13.1 million subscribers, tops revenue estimates as membership push gains steam
cnbc.com

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

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

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

You can't trust people. People listen to Cold Play and voted for the Nazi Party.

People. What a bunch of bastards.

What's wrong with Coldplay?

Nothing, I think the point is that people will listen to a band that may have left of center sensibilities (I don't know about Coldplay in particular) then vote the opposite. A great example is the video of the old white couple, wearing thin Blue line flags, dancing to Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine.

Ben and Jerry's "Coldplay's Pretentious Vanilla"

Bland, self important and boring

If you gave humanity the ultimatum that they can continue paying what they're currently paying, or subscribe to nothing for a year but be rewarded with the same price to access all movies and tv series ever created, via a single service, for the rest of their lives... I'm willing to bet more than 2/3 of the human population would cave and re-subscribe within a couple of months.

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Because they made the cost of adding a household less than the cost of two accounts, then banked on the fact that people wouldn't want to "screw over" whoever they were sharing a password with. It was a good business strategy, if shitty consumer practice.

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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.

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.

Same here. I set up a Servarr stack and showed everyone in my house how to use Jellyseer to pick shows. I set up Jellyfin on all of their devices as well as the common TV. It works wonderfully well and they can download anything.

So what do I see when I look over their shoulder to see what they're using? Netflix and Prime Video. SMH.

Yup, happens every time. Even with everything working and that my wife can pick her own shows to automatically download, I think it's the waiting that does it, because God forbid you have to wait 5-10 minutes. Also too, I can see the appeal in browsing someone else's library and watching something on a whim.

Yes, and I think there is some inertia and cognitive load at play. Going to Jellyseer to find a show, figuring out what's good, committing to the download, waiting for the download and then switching over to Jellyfin is a bit more cognitively involved than the basically mindless browsing you can do on Netflix. I see it with my kids with Tiktok as well. Tiktok looks even more passive with the algorithm just feeding you non-stop, constantly varying content.

Agreed. I'm not really one for much TV or movies anymore, though when I am, I know exactly what I want to watch. I also tend to watch things I've already seen before as background while I'm doing something else. But I know there are plenty of people that when they get home, they just want to zone out, and that mindless browsing, plus content they've never seen before available instantly certainly could have that appeal.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

At some point they made a decision to change from something else to Netflix, so perhaps they’re not afraid of change but might need a compelling reason to use a different service?

Could be an opportunity for you to educate them on what options are available and why that will benefit them long term.

He could just pickup another service for a month or two and share the account with them. I know most others are planning on cracking down, but none have so far afaik.

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.

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

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

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And just like that we were guaranteed another price increase.

Fucking weak. People are just begging to be screwed.

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.

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.

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

Well, yeah, and I suppose with the erosion in rights and healthcare in other countries too, maybe humans are just not great at standing up to power.

Perhaps it’s just that, as an American, I am quite frustrated at the lack of respect corporations offer customers. Recently I’ve noticed a lot of skincare buyouts and subsequent shit tier reformulations, but they’re often done by French companies. Maybe it’s more a western thing— I typically buy most of my stuff while in Japan these days because their companies at least continue to provide good products. But their culture treats workers horribly so it’s not exactly ideal there either.

Many people are too lazy to pirate

This is the most shocking part for me, like, dude, we have it really easy nowadays, if you want to hoard you have plenty of tools, and not to mention you can even automate this (granted, it is not very user friendly but it is the kind of things that doesn't require much maintenance from your side).

Do you want to stream? There are a shit ton of streaming sites for free lol, not to mention the ultimate user friendly way to get a better streaming app on lots of platforms synced across them, Stremio + Torrentio + RD.

This is a bubble.

Yeah, we are in a bubble inside a bubble, I realized about this way back ago when I noticed all these scams selling media on Facebook were getting a lot of attention, like, dude they got those TV shows and movies from the web, and you are there too lol.

And yet this is 2 posts down from an article about their price hikes and increase in ads coming up.

I guess people love that shit... \o/

Am I on glue? I could have sworn the quarterly earnings call results were abysmal. Like quarter over quarter their revenue has tanked.

No. They've lost subscribers several times, but always in reaction to price hikes.

When you increase your prices 20% and lose 5% of your subscribers what you've done is reduce bandwidth costs while massively increasing profits.

And the crackdown on account sharing has been massively successful for them. If zero people had paid for new accounts their profits still would have gone up from their savings in bandwidth and processing. But then tons of people bit the bullet and started paying.

I understand that but the data I saw showed their revenue decreased substantially. I can't find it for the life of me though. It was some google popup on my phone and I have no idea how to get back to it lol.

Anywho, seems like I don't know what I'm talking about cause the stock is surging.

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.

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

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

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.

I used to do that but it's also frustrating, because when something new comes out, it's just random luck if I'm on the right streaming service to watch it. Otherwise I have to wait...

Wasn't this supposed to be as good or better than the video rental store, where they had everything in one place?

Blockbuster had new releases and a handful of classics. One store probably had .01% of the volume of titles on Netflix. If they even had that many.

But now no one has all the new major releases, so in that regard it's a worse experience.

I also remember they had the shit knockoff movies next to the real ones to fool Grandma into getting you that "Deformers movie you like".

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.

Yeah but the problem is, I was watching a lot of really bad movies on Netflix, just because they didn't have anything I wanted to watch. So I was sitting there, feeling bored or annoyed or disgusted by the shit movies... I actually felt depressed by what I watched even!

So I was like... I'm paying for this, and I feel like shit most of the time when watching it.

No more.

That's fair, if this was your case. No point in paying for something you don't like.

As much as I hate old titles disappearing, I also enjoy the new content Netflix offers. To each their own, I guess.

Netflix produced content is either garbage or cancelled after first season. (or both)

The only quality content Netflix has is made by someone else and more than 20 years ago.

Yeah everyone has different taste. I actually like British TV a lot more then American too.

The people who don't know how I understand completely. But honestly people who have the know-how are underestimating how easy it has got. I can torrent a movie at a much higher quality than Netflix will even stream to my PC and do it all within 5 minutes.

Now imagine you have a family that likes to watch TV in the living room and not in your room.

So you download the movie to your Plex or Jellyfin server and watch it in living room. I do exactly this all the time.

Right, I use Plex now too. However, it only has things that I already downloaded. So if we don't plan, we end up watching something on Netflix instead of spending extra time on looking+downloading+going back and forth between rooms.

Well Plex soon is adding support for buying and renting stuff.

"download this app, create an account, I'll add you as a friend, off you go"

It's literally as easy as Netflix in that scenario.

hell, I'm across the country at my parent's place and got them a movie by remoting into my home pc to start a torrent and had it populatred in my Plex server and streaming at full bluray quality 4k hdr in less time that it took for them to get popcorn ready.

they never even knew that i had to do any of that. i just told them "yeah, I'll get that set up while you get snacks"

But does Netflix even have good movies? Like I think it'd be easier to do exactly that but on HBO Max or Disney Plus, or a TV show on Hulu.

Weird. I can find and download a movie in a couple of minutes. It's almost as easy as learning how to download and navigate Netflix.

Pirating movies has never been easier, but wait there's more, you can just stream them for free too.

There's even places you can buy a box for a one time fee, and have all channels and services free. Or get a subscription that offers every service and channel on earth.

It's so easy my 80 yr old father can do it.

There's no maintenance, no technical expertise needed, you don't even need a VPN.

The only thing Netflix really offers is convenience and legality.

Eh, you don't need to do all that. But I also have the same problem with the research stuff even if I use Netflix. A lot of the recommendations are not great for me, and low quality stuff. Once in a while something good will pop up though.

Usually I write down recommendations people give me in conversation then I refer back to that list when I'm looking for something to watch. If it's not on Netflix, well...

For me it's usually hear about a few things that could be interesting throughout the day and download them while I shower after work. A 5gb movie comes through in a few minutes so I don't even feel it. It's usually 2 or 3 at a time, and since I'd still be going in blind on Netflix recs, it doesn't seem much worse.

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?

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).

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.

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

Oh, well. In general, I agree, but there must be examples that don't fit with your statement. In the end, companies pursue profit, ideally, offering a better service gives you exactly that. I know this rarely is the case, but it can happen.

Arguably MS has become less shit over the last decade. But yes.

You must not work in IT

Do you remember the "open source is cancer" MS?

Sorry, I can't hear you over how much they have businesses over the barrel with their absurd subscription licensing costs

How has MS become more friendly to FOSS? (Genuine question)

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.

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.

Set up a plex or Jellyfin server that your dad could use

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

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

Also the crackdown in account sharing is helping.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

May I ask why? If you are paying the full sub yourself, but the person you kindly share the sub with gets cut off, why would you stop paying? If you enjoy the content and service for the price, why does it matter if you lose the ability to share if you are the only one footing the bill.

This is such a weird take. I mean, either I am sharing the bill (I'm not), and the cutting off is rising my price or I... you know, actually like the person using the sub when I'm not and I'm still mad that they are getting cut off. Plus who's to say I'm the primary user? For all I know I'm in there way less than the other person.

It's weird to assume that I would only be annoyed at my own inconvenience and not by the inconvenience of someone else. Plus in practice the outcome would have to be paying their cut-down "second account" nonsense and paying more myself, it'd be kinda petty otherwise.

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).

You kind of switched between "we" and "I" speak. So I interpreted it as you paying the full sub fee but someone else had access to it. You mentioned that you would not pay for a second sub, but what if you PW sharer was willing to cover just that cost? I feel like there are 2 kinds of PW sharers. Some that PW share as a gift. And others that split the cost for a single account. It's hard to tell when people say what they (the individual) are willing to pay for in terms of cost if in practice they are splitting the bill.

You are overestimating how much we're willing to think or talk about this. It may be a cultural thing or a socioeconomic thing, but with media subs being a thing for decades there's a blob of people where some have each other's subs, different people are paying for different subs and there are different shares and accesses floating around. Some of the subs come from cable bundles, even.

I'm pretty sure in the extended friends and family group there are multiple bundled subs for some of the same services, some of which may not even be in use because devices are grandfathered into the first one that got acquired.

We really aren't putting that much collective attention into this problem. People just watch what they have. When a show isn't in a service the group has access to it just gets ignored. I'm easily the most engaged in the whole thing and even I don't care that much. So that explains why I'd be making decisions about which tier of Netflix is being paid. I am the one who has paid access to that one, and I'm the one engaged enough to have an opinion. At one point I told the group that Netflix had hiked prices and I had downgraded to the 1080p tier with two screens, in case we hit the screen limit or the location restrictions. Everybody just shrugged, said "eff Netflix" and moved on with their lives. We've never hit the limits or been flagged for password sharing.

I'm aware of how media subs work and pw sharing works. But for me, I pay for the subscriptions I want access to. If pw sharing gets cut off, that is a free gift I used to give to other people as a bonus, but it doesn't impact how I chose which subs I pay for to access the content I watch. That's why I am curious why the primary sub holder of a service would cancel a sub if there's a PW share crackdown if they are the sole person paying for it and it's a subscription they enjoy utilizing.

Again, you're looking at it wrong. Or weird, at least. It's like asking why I'd be mad that the brand of cookies a member of my family eats gets a price hike if I don't like them myself. They're still in my shopping cart every week.

I don't have a concept of a "primary sub holder". It's stuff a group of people gets for the group, and who is paying for which specific parts of the fixed expenses is lost to the mists of time.

I get that US and anglo cultures in general are less collectivist, but this seems more extreme than that. Surely the concept of a close-knit group of people sharing costs without much precise bookkeeping is not completely alien to you. Do you split grocery shopping with the rest of your household? I mean, I did that when I was sharing an apartment during university, so maybe it's an age thing?

I am aware of close knit families. But when one family member had cable, we'd just have movie/game/tv watch party with the extended family. Sure, if anyone wanted to have it in their own home independent of the social viewing experience, you could always buy it for your household. And the family members that had the cable package, probably would have kept it even if we didn't come over to visit and watch a game on ESPN or some other cable TV. PW sharing is fine within the household. It's when it 's out of the household where the crackdown really happens.

Hey, I wasn't the one who switched the system to a username and passwod authorization. My "household" isn't defined by the physical location anymore than their account system is. Friends and family groups don't work however Netflix wants them to work for monetization purposes. There are blood relations who don't sleep under the same roof but hang out daily. There are friend groups that share a roof. There are couples who spend weeks at a time apart but still live together.

It's not my fault that Netflix borked the business model and then tried to walk it back once it lured everybody else to a profit dark hole. I'm not gonna change how my social relationships work for the sake of them having a neat revenue stream with no gray areas.

So no, PW sharing is fine, period, that's what concurrent screen limits are for. What constitutes a "household" is not for Netflix to define, and I have a social group where some expenses just float around in limbo without a clear attribution or distinction between payers and users. Welcome to existing in real life and having zero time to worry about enshittified late captialist terminally online bullshit, honestly.

Netflix was always a physical household concept business model. They started by mailing DVDs to a physical address. I think the challenge has been around the technology to enforce that on the digital end where the devices allow portability of service via digital distribution and resolution of IP or other identifiers to household is not always deterministic. Netflix does get to define what household means in their terms of service for their business agreement with the customer.

No, it wasn't. They were VERY glad to suggest that password sharing was a feature, not a bug, while they were trying to drive cable TV out of business and establish a leadership position against other streaming services. They also allow you to watch on multiple screens, download files to watch offline on the go and, crucially, actively provide discounted accounts to watch on multiple locations even after reneging on the promises they made during the user acquisition stage. Nothing they do is consistent with the service being tied to households instead of accounts except trying to charge you extra for it. Hey, I know that tech start ups will eventually try to pee on me, but don't come here to tell me it's raining.

So I say again, Netflix doesn't get to arbitrarily limit tech and back out of features just because they engaged in a suicidal business model in the pursuit of endless growth, and they don't get to redefine my social relationships for me. I am the client here, and I get to say when their offer has enshittified enough that I no longer want it.

For now, I don't want their overpriced premium tier anymore. It's back to UHD BR for me if I want something to look shiny. And the moment they try to enforce their dumb password sharing rule I'm out entirely. I feel zero remorse or sense that I'm taking advantage of them for this. If anything, they are the ones "breaking things", so they have the responsibility to fix them.

I don't know that one cheeky tweet from their pr/marketing team mens they gladly advertised password sharing as a feature. Would need to go back to the TOS for subs back then. Multiple screens is one thing, but multiple households is another.

I've mooched off my parent's cable account for 10+ years for streaming well after I moved to another state. As services cracked down on the practice I personally have never felt entitled to the TV services my household was not paying for. Some I chose to pay for myself, others I realize aren't for me and don't subscribe. Forl Netflix, I haven't yet broached the subject of joining accounts and paying for the additional logins option, but maybe I'll do that as a cost saving measure. But I can't think of a moral justification for why my household should be entitled to a TV service my parents pay for hundreds of miles away from where I live.

When CEOs talked about password sharing it was under the marketing POV that those folks would eventually convert into subscribers naturally. I guess they didn't expect it to become the norm. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/11/netflix-ceo-says-account-sharing-is-ok/

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I get it for free through my phone carrier. I hope they're not counting me in that 13 million.

I'm in the same boat. I got some super sweet deal through my phone company. It was right when they started cracking down on sharing accounts. This way they can claim they have more viewers. No way I'd pay real money to them, but free enough to not quit

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.

Thanks for this tip. I hadn’t heard about this before, and it sounds like an interesting thing to add to my tool chest.

so if you browse youtube that can go via a country that does not allow ads.

Can you tell me more about this? I’ve never heard about that this is a thing, and it sounds like a good thing to known

Set your country to Albania, Moldova, or Myanmar and you wont get ads on youtube.

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.

Yes I do use opnsense and it was more annoying than control d. I tried both options.

I see. IMO the opnsense method is good because it's set and forget, works across all devices without needing to touch them

I mean so is control d a set and forget. Even more so because they manage any changes and workarounds the companies come up with. Its basically designed for this. Having tried both options its my preferred option.

We have a free subscription through our home fibre bundle.

Well Netflix is still the best streaming service when you think about the price and the content.

I was just a price hike away from resigning but it never happened.

In Switzerland there are also a lot of streaming services which haven’t arrived yet.

And we’re still sharing our account with my mom who lives 15 kilometers away from us.

In Switzerland pirating is also legal, so I know what I do :)

It’s legal but I also want to support the movies or shows I enjoy. So buying or subscribing is the only way for me.

Not a lot of the money goes to the people making the films/series from netflix. Buy a digital or physical copy of the film directly at the production company if you want to support them.