Things They don’t do well on Netflix. After a splendid decade, the streaming platform has been shaken with a plunge in its stock shares – it’s not the only one, not even close – and, more importantly, a worrying drop in the number of subscribers.
To combat this second problem, Netflix announced several measures. Among them, the arrival of a cheaper subscription with advertising stood out, but even more striking was the launch of a plan for fight against shared accounts and their abuse. That plan, which is already underway in a preliminary way, is not working as expected.
A confusing strategy that does not work
Measures to combat this abuse of shared accounts were activated in March in Peru, Chile and Costa Rica. The idea: ask your customers to pay an extra amount if they share their accounts with users who do not live at the same address.
In Rest of World indicated how the deployment of these preliminary tests was decided to be done in those countries to minimize possible negative effects and complaints from its customers in other markets that are more important to the company.
According to this strategy, in countries like Peru, subscribers can add up to two additional users with whom they do not live. They have to pay 8 soles (2 euros) per month for each of those ‘extra’ users.
In a consultation with more than a dozen Peruvian subscribers, it became clear that the deployment is being erratic. Many of them had not even received a unified communication two months after the measures were activated, and in fact the conditions do not seem to be universal either.
For some, this price increase has caused them to unsubscribe directly from Netflix, while others continue to share the account as before without warnings or warnings. For those who did receive the notification with the new terms, those who have ignored them seem to continue using Netflix and sharing their account as before also without consequences.
There are questions about what Netflix considers “an address,” and this evidence seems to indicate that at the company is experiencing with different mechanisms to notify and apply the measures. What is not certain is that at the moment these mechanisms are having the return that Netflix expected.
