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.
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.
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.
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.