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.



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6 comments
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In the end everything boils down to bottom line. Password sharing crackdown is, IMHO, going to slightly boost Netflix subscription numbers, but I don't think that it would be enough to improve financial situation of the company in the long term. Netflix woes have more to do with their policy of "let's throw large number of new shows on the wall and see which one sticks" which temporarily improved variety of content on the platform, but the inevitable cancellations created too much bad blood with the fans and even casual viewers. I think that the most watched shows on Netflix currently are those like Friends or Star Trek, which the fans know that they are over and can't be cancelled in the middle of the run.

Posted using CineTV

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I can always count on you to have a good response. good insight!

"let's throw large number of new shows on the wall and see which one sticks"

This was evidenced in how they were giving just any comedian a one-hour special and most of them were just terrible. I am sure it was good for the comedians themselves but for Netflix? Probably not.

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I wonder who wakes up every morning with these bad ideas that Netflix is getting. It is hard to understand that they are aware they will lose customers in the long run and still choose to go with something like this.

From cancelling good shows to this, they are sure playing games with people.

Maybe they may actually generate more revenue and get more subscribers in the future, as people will eventually get used to it again and pay, but it's hard to say. It's not like they have great content these days.

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I would imagine they have enough management that they were aware that in the short term this was going to do some damage but now they really need to go back to the drawing board and start to focus on having actual good content. I feel as though they used to, hence my username. Let's hope that they do. If they don't, someone else will pick up the slack hopefully.

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Use Cinema or Cyberflix as it is the same as having Netflix. I watch all the latest shows and movies whether they are Amazon or Netflix they are all there. This is what is going to happen to everyone as we all share our codes.

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It was the very next day that a friend of mine gave me access to his Plex server and already, I like it more than my Netflix account but the caveat is that he has to maintain it so we'll see how long he stays interested in doing that.