Netflix Reneges on It’s “Love is Sharing a Password” Statement
Netflix reneges on it’s 2017 tweet, “Love is sharing a password.”
Love is sharing a password.
— Netflix (@netflix) March 10, 2017
The streaming service cracking down on password sharing has been talked about for a while now, but it had been delayed in a bunch of countries. In February, Netflix stopped password sharing in Canada, New Zealand, Spain and Portugal, but left the U.S. alone. That no longer seems to be the case as users will be receiving an email telling them, “Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with – your household.”
For years Netflix had hinted that sharing a password was not a problem. They even encouraged it in the above tweet from 2017. 6 years later and Netflix doesn’t believe their own tweets anymore. Sharing a password with family members is one of the things that made Netflix great! It doesn’t seem that the streaming giant is struggling for money. According to an April Yahoo! News article regarding Netflix’s Q1 earnings they aren’t having any big money problems. In the article they take a look at the company’s free cash numbers since 2020. Free cash is basically the profit a company made in a year, and Netflix’s flow has been doing just fine. In 2020 they had $1.9 BILLION in free cash. 2021 went down to $132 million, but rebounded with huge numbers in 2022 finishing with $1.6 billion.
Making TV shows and movies is an expensive undertaking so of course they want to bring in as many paying subscribers as possible. We can’t really blame them, but at the same time the beauty of Netflix was that a streaming service was encouraging sharing passwords at a time when cable companies were gouging their own customers. Netflix has come a long way since they began mailing subscribers DVDs. For many years they have been riding high as probably the best streamer out there, but as we learned in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” Maybe Netflix is becoming the villain and needs to go back through it’s own old tweets to remind itself that sharing (a password) is caring!
