What’s Trending- or Maybe, What Isn’t?
When you think of the biggest way to watch the coolest shows, movies, and original series, what do you think of? Obviously, streaming services are insanely popular right now, and likely will be for a long time to come. Well, most of them at least. One of the industry giants seems like it’s on the decline, and I’m going to talk about why.
You probably already know which service I’m talking about. The company who got their start by shipping out DVDs, beating out the competition to the point of some competitors, most famously, Blockbuster Video, out of business. The subscription service with 230.7 million subscribers as of February 27, 2023. The service with 6,000 titles in the United States alone, with 16 million downloads in 2021, and holds 8% of the world’s viewing time globally. I’m of course speaking about Netflix.
As a teenager, almost everyone I know watches shows or movies on Netflix. It really is an industry leader, in fact, they were the first of the current popular streaming services to launch. Netflix paved the way for how people consume entertainment on a whole. The only problem? Netflix is losing subscribers at a rapid pace. Why?
An easy explanation is bad decisions made by a company looking to grow their assets. An even simpler one is a company looking to make more money by changing the things that people like about their service. Netflix isn’t the only company that’s doing this, and is far from the only streaming company to make this mistake. YouTube has also been under some heat lately for making some questionable brand decisions. However, because Netflix is a paid service, the severity of the issues they’re causing is far greater.
Netflix is a paid service. You can’t watch any of their content for free (legally). Even the ad-supported subscription costs money. Netflix is actually the most expensive streaming service at $15.49 for the standard HD service. This has caused people to buy a Netflix account and password share. The practice is simple: you give someone—usually a friend, relative, or significant other—the password to your Netflix account. That way, you both pay less and get to watch all the cool shows. But recently, Netflix has had a problem with this.
As it will make them more money if they force people to pay for their own individual subscriptions, the company announced that they’re going to start cracking down on password sharing, much to the public’s dismay. Technically, you can still share your password. But it’ll cost you an extra fee on your account. This, in addition to Netflix’s constant cancellation of various shows, has led many people to begin dropping the service altogether.
So what’s the lesson? For other companies, weigh the cost of your decisions. Yes, you might make more money off of those who give in and pay the additional subscription fees. But you might lose a few million people (and their monthly payments) in the process. And for the rest of you out there contemplating what to do about the Netflix situation, you might want to consider switching to some other services before they go down the same path.
