Isn't that true of almost everything?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Netflix Gains 8 Million Global Subscribers Amid Price Hikes and Push to Ad-Supported Streaming
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Let’s say everyone chooses more value, as you put it. Then creators get zero income to make the content, and there’s zero money to set up and generate infrastructure.
I’d say on the long run you get less (zero, to put it in number) value if everyone goes with piracy over paying for content.
People are so brainwashed these days lol. Subscriptions have gone up when they put ads and still share you? Just wow. What do companies and governments have to do to people to make them wake up
Paying to watch ads is stupid. Paying even more than before to not watch them is worse.
This is literally cable companies, version 2.
Just pure greed
This is literally cable companies, version 2.
Just pure greed
Honestly people would pay $50/mo to watch Netflix with ads if the government told them so.
Or you are forced to make better content instead of putting out garbage just to say you met your quota or whatever.
People pirated music but the music industry saw a sales spike because people ended up buying songs they like.
It’s the logic of a free trial (which music and movies never offered).
Shows what MacRumors' forum users know, I guess. How many claimed this would end them?
Or pay a bit extra an still avoid ads, yea it's a bit ****** bat those are your choices if you want to continue withing Netflix original stuff. Netflix is well beyond the wc funded groth face, thay actualy have to start making money now to keep wall st. happy. You know the thing where profits have to pe higher than expectations every quarter or the stock price wil be beat down beyond all recognition.
This is such a spun article. Could also be titled Netflix experiences slower growth in 2024 due to all their bullsh*t. Lots of other articles presented this is slowed growth Q1 2024 and this is heralding it like it is some win.
That’s a different debate, one where we might agree.
But if the content you want to watch is not worth 15 bucks a month, maybe it’s not worthy of your time either.
Based on 1st quarter numbers, I'd say no more than 15 percent. See below.
I don't believe that to be the case based on my rough math.
The U.S. wireless phone carriers haven't reported 2nd quarter earnings yet but let's take a look at theirs and Netflix's 1st quarter results...
Verizon said they had "158,000 wireless retail postpaid phone net LOSSES;" AT&T reported "349,000 postpaid phone net adds;" and T-Mobile reported "postpaid phone net customer additions of 532 thousand." That's an increase of 723,000 postpaid phone customers across the 3 carriers.
Netflix grew subscribers by 9.32 million during the 1st quarter of which 2.53 million came from the U.S. / Canada (UCAN).
Keep in mind that not all postpaid wireless plans offer Netflix for free. For example, T-Mobile's "Essentials" and "Essentials Saver" plans DO NOT offer Netflix for free while only Verizon's "Unlimited Plus" plan comes with Netflix. I just checked and I don't see any AT&T plan that offers Netflix for free, but correct me if I'm wrong.
So.... 532,000 new T-Mobile postpaid phone customers minus 158,000 Verizon postpaid phone customer losses = 374,000 new postpaid phone customers in the 1st quarter.
374,000 is 14.78 percent of the 2.53 million new UCAN Netflix subscribers. Let's say 530,000 of those new Netflix subscribers are from Canada. That means up to 18.7 percent of the 2 million new U.S. Netflix subscribers are coming from a U.S. telco.
If you remove the new postpaid phone customers from the 374,000 that are on plans that do not come with Netlfix, then you're probably somewhere between 12 percent and 15 percent of new U.S. Netflix subscribers who are coming from a U.S. telco. That's not "a lot" as you put it.
Something else to consider... how many of those 374,000 new postpaid phone customers are on a family plan? A family of 4 doesn't mean 4 new Netflix subscriber accounts; It's considered one new Netflix subscriber account. That puts the number even lower.
Last edited:
Like others have mentioned, ads at the start of episodes are tolerable for me. But I find I’m unable to tolerate ads during episodes, especially when they are not at stopping points created by the producers.
Has this improved at all? The early implementations of ad-supported tiers that I experienced were awful, incredibly lazy, with scenes cut off, endings mangled, and so on. You couldn’t go back and replay something without the whole thing crashing.
Has this improved at all? The early implementations of ad-supported tiers that I experienced were awful, incredibly lazy, with scenes cut off, endings mangled, and so on. You couldn’t go back and replay something without the whole thing crashing.
Here’s the part I don’t understand. If a show put out by Netflix is so bad, then why are people even bothering to pirate it in the first place?
What is wrong with people!? Paying price hikes for a garbage catalog? I can't with people anymore. What was in the covid vaccine that is causing people to make poo financial decisions like this? Oy!!
I left all the streaming apps this past year. Between price hikes, splitting of content and new content being terrible, there wasn't much value to go around. Switched to plex + physical media and couldn't be happier. Now what I own is mine and no service can simply just take it away. I don't miss the apps one bit and I saved about $75/month cancelling them all.
People seem to think it’s fine to pirate digital goods… thinking there is a difference between digital and physical goods.
I put them in the same category as shoplifters, burglars etc
It’s theft. Period.
Next phase will be increased cost of ad-supported subscription PLUS INCREASE in number of ad minutes per hour of viewing until it becomes a reincarnation of regular TV. If Comcast (Xfinity) ever stops including it in my cable package, I won’t sign up to replace it. hardly ever watch it.
From a legal standpoint, there is a difference but that doesn't mean pirating is legal/right. Things like the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act, CASE Act, copyright infringement laws, etc. address issues regarding pirating streaming content.
It's not "theft" but is still illegal and wrong.
There have been interesting points raised, and I haven’t really thought about how privacy vs theft; does distinguishing privacy from theft matter, are they both “bad” or is it by nature a degree of “badness”?
The start of my not thought-through idea: although you’re not “taking” the item from the owner, the taker is still up one item, and the owner is out one sale. Although not everyone would buy in the alternative, some would. So would the rights to the item not have lost value? A highly pirated album must surely be worth fewer USD than had the same album not been pirated, right?
I am inclined to believe, at the moment, there’s a distinction between piracy and theft. From a morality scale of 1-10 (assign either end as better or worse, doesn’t matter). Whereas morality of piracy may sit between 4 and 7, theft might occupy morality between 1 and 10. We can all imagine a person who steals out of necessity, and we can all imagine a teenager downloading a movie they’ll never be able to afford. There’s not a situation that I can conceive of where there is a piracy of necessity, nor where piracy is the equivalent of stealing the life savings of a person without earning potential.
This is a common misconception, cable TV you’re paying for the feed/access to channels, that’s why there’s ads. Premium channels like HBO, FX etc never had ads because you were paying for them.
I remember the dark times, when you had to watch ads on shows even though you were paying your cable company for access to TV, and most of it was forgettable fluff that wasn't even worth watching, with a few gems strewn in here and there. Thank God streaming came along to save us from that world.
We can also thank all the cord cutters out there that convinced the cable companies that forced TV/Internet bundling is not lawful. Millions of cable TV subscribers lost convinced these companies that acted like utilities to market only internet subscriptions instead, along with streaming bundles that don't involve rebroadcast and sports fees, along with many hidden surcharges/taxes. What a difference a decade has brought.
