Hacker News

There might have been a net benefit, but if so it’s not something you can get from this article. This is a PR Newswire style piece that’s basically just the journalist transcribing what a Netflix press relations person told them. HBO did an identical push.

The relevant questions are:

1. If 5.9M was net new subscribers rather than total, and if so what was the expected value versus this time over previous years? They say it exceeded expectations but not what they were or how they were derived. From this article we can neither describe the size of the effect nor attribute it to the policy change.
2. Where were the new subscribers added? The US based streaming services I’m familiar with get fully half their revenue from the US, and upwards of 80% between the US and Europe. Whatever the new market subscriber growth was needs to be subtracted from this value.
3. Cancellations are going to be a lagging indicator. I share accounts with my mother, who would have a problem paying for so many accounts on her own. As soon as I run into an issue with a service regarding account sharing, I am cancelling that service. I’m moving from having about ten separate services that I pay between $5 and $15 per month for, to three services where I rotate between different ones as I catch up on content. Net users metrics will have to settle down over several months to see the real effect here because that’s how consumers work.

At the end of the day, maybe it will be a net benefit for Netflix and HBO, but until we know more, treat numbers with skepticism. They have every reason to portray their decision as a success because it makes people feel like they’re making a mountain out of a molehill if they’re the only one complaining about it.