Emerson Phillips
Netflix has long been praised for its complete lack of ads and commercials but company co-CEO Reed Hastings says that ads will soon be incorporated into the service, at least according to a Deadline report.
Hastings says that Netflix will begin to implement advertising on Netflix in the “next year or two.”
“One way to increase the price spread is advertising on low-end plans and to have lower prices with advertising,” Hastings said. “Those who have followed Netflix know that I’ve been against the complexity of advertising and a big fan of the simplicity of subscription.”
And while he has been against the incorporation of advertising in the past, he acknowledged that this would be a necessary step for the streaming platform. He also said that this would be a positive for Netflix subscribers, as it will give them “consumer choice” and the ability to choose a cheaper subscription, albeit one with advertisements.
Videos by Rare
“But as much as I’m a fan of that, I’m a bigger fan of consumer choice,” he continued. “Allowing consumers who would like to have a lower price and are advertising-tolerant get what they want makes a lot of sense. So, that’s something we’re looking at now, we’re trying to figure out over the next year or two. Think of us as quite open to offering an even lower.”
Also, sharing your Netflix password with family and friends could soon be a thing of the past. In its quarterly shareholder letter on Tuesday, the streaming giant warned a global crackdown on password sharing is coming.
Netflix has nearly 222 million paying subscribers, and “over 100 million additional households” worldwide are using shared Netflix accounts, including more than 30 million in the US and Canada.
“This is a big opportunity as these households are already watching Netflix and enjoying our service,” the company wrote in its letter. “Sharing likely helped fuel our growth by getting more people using and enjoying Netflix. And we’ve always tried to make sharing within a member’s household easy, with features like profiles and multiple streams. While these have been very popular, they’ve created confusion about when and how Netflix can be shared with other households.”
Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash
We are subscribers of Netflix.
My husband likes to watch his favorite movies on Netflix and I like certain movies (we don’t watch tv together) so he watches his shows and I like to sit in the bedroom and watch mine.
That isn’t fair to double the charge.
I guess we’ll cancel Netflix yet again!!
I doubt that they will be able to block you from sharing password within the same household (IP address), but they might be able to keep you from sharing with your family members who don’t live in your house.
My kids are in college at different locations. What are they going to do make everyone pay separately?
It’s bullshit. Constantly raising our subscription and now we have to pay again for no ads😡 May just have to go to a Prime😡
I pay for 4 screens, where I watch them is my prerogative. Not having ads was one of the main reasons we subscribed. I will cancel my subscription if this happens, they charge too much to have to wait so long for a new season. Not much is updated all that quickly. They will lose many customers for these poor decisions, some of us have been customers since they first appeared, where’s our customer appreciation?