Netflix blocked me and you may very well be blocked soon as well

They had talked about how they were going to start cutting down on account sharing earlier this year and we all had to wait and see if they were serious. Well it happened to me yesterday and it looks like the 4+ years of me riding someone else's account has finally come to a close.

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The above is not my image but I had the same thing on my own televisions starting yesterday. It is kind of ironic because I had FINALLY found a series on Netflix that I seriously thought was worth watching and was kind of stoked about getting back into it only to login and see this on my screen.

I actually know the person whose account I was riding so we played around with the settings a bit including the "I'm traveling" option you can choose so we messed with that. Upon doing so we found out that this would in fact give me access in my own place but by doing so it cut him off on his end. We live in different parts of the country so I can see this being a real problem for people that actually DO live in the same household but one of them goes on a business trip or something like that. There are going to be a lot of angry customers when this happens.

There are other ways around it such as setting up a VERY SPECIFIC VPN to near that person's household, but this seems like more trouble than it is worth.

For me, there is 0% chance that I am going to establish and pay for my own account and I would imagine that a vast majority of the people that were riding other people's accounts for years, just like me, will not set up and pay for their own Netflix account.

Is Netflix shooting themselves in the foot with this? I would imagine that they will to a certain degree since there is already some level of animosity towards them with that period of time where they became very political and almost preachy with their content. Those folks already left and now we are going to see a lot more people leaving as well. For example, my friend who way paying $15 a month for 4 connections only considered it worthwhile because of the fact that he was in effect giving a monthly gift to his friends. By his own admission he said if it was just for him, he wouldn't bother with it because he rarely finds anything on it that he actually wants to watch, he just does so because it is there and accessible. Mostly, he feels the way that I do in that almost all of what Netflix features is pretty garbage.

Already the messageboards and Reddit are filled with workarounds but honestly, unless you are pretty tech savvy, it is going to be a lot more trouble than it is worth in my opinion. People are already speaking about using Plex servers and honestly, that might have been a better idea to begin with. There is always going back to sailing of course.

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In the past and with most of the writeups that I do on here the ones that I tend to view more favorably tend to be things that i got via torrents and my decision to get said torrents was based on word of mouth recommendations or by suggestions i see in places such as here. The stuff I randomly accessed on Netflix tended to be bad more often than good. Therefore, even if they dropped the price to $5 a month I don't think it would be worth it.

When Netflix became a part of my life I used it because it was cheap, simple, and accessible. I had my fears back then that it would eventually simply become the racket that cable and satellite subscriptions became years before. It happened in stages in that many more streaming services started to emerge and if you subscribe to all of them, there is no longer any value in being a part of streaming instead of something like DirecTV. I think we have come to that point and if Netflix and others want to play this game I think they do it to their own detriment because many millions of users like me are simply going to go back to piracy.

Remember Netflix! It was actually YOUR idea to ever allow password sharing, so you shouldn't be so surprised that people actually ended up doing it.