The story here, from a technical and management perspective, is the incremental cost, in both engineering resources and company PR image, of handling edge cases.
* Are 'edge cases' < 1% or are they ~ 20% (say) of usage.
* Is there a significant downside to ignoring the tricky stuff.
The thing is, these aren't edge cases, Netflix's requirements are just extremely stupid. Refusing to sell your service to someone who does not live in one household is moronic.
> Sounds like Netflix needs a "Falsehoods programmers believe about families" list.
These are not decisions by programers. These are business decisions.
They are trying to find a way to part as many people with as much money as possible but not more. If they err in one direction they leave money on the table, if they err in the other direction they start losing subscribers.
that article comes up with weird ideas about the definition of a household. a household is one building, maybe everyone sharing the same kitchen. anyone who does not live at that location, even temporary, is not part of that household. this does not only apply to netflix, but also to my taxes and benefits.
a german public tv license is per household too and would not include the hospital patient either. and of course, they get plenty of complaints about edgecases as well.
if netflix wanted to sell to families, they could do that by somehow letting you specify who the familymember is, and how they relate to you and limiting it to a number of people.
If they have used resources to block password sharing by checking and comparing location , devices and network the resources and cost for this edge case must me a high enough percentage.
Else they should just be ignoring password sharing as a concern altogether rather than causing negative press.
The number is 100 million accounts that they are blaming for stalled subscriber growth[1]. That is 100m out of 231m total subscribers[2]. So they are going to war with 43% of their existing subscriber base. That said, they have backed down on rolling this policy out in the US meaning the number of actual password sharers they are going to potentially monetize is very small relative to the ongoing damage they are doing to their brand. I don’t even share my netflix password but am currently actively looking at alternatives as a result of this policy because it just seems scummy enough to motivate me to move. Especially when password sharing was something they used to actively encourage as a means of growing their active users[3]
It’s always an interesting moment when a company stalls out on organic growth and decides its strategy should be to start to blackmail existing customers and try to grow revenue that way. This is how you get to a situation where enterprise IT leaders live in fear of being audited by Oracle and actively seek to replace what was once a key part of their IT strategy just because the vendor is so aggressive about leaping on any license infringement however unintentional.
* Are 'edge cases' < 1% or are they ~ 20% (say) of usage.
* Is there a significant downside to ignoring the tricky stuff.
etc.