A stirring and inspirational testimonial in favor of the raw power of apathy today, as Netflix revealed that, for the most part, customers just sort of rolled over and took the company’s recent push to crack down on password sharing. News of the general spiritual capitulation comes as Netflix announces its intention to make its increased enforcement on sharing accounts as planetary as it can, pushing the initiative into holdouts of resistance like India, Indonesia, Croatia, and Kenya.
All of this is per THR, reporting on a Q2 earnings report from the streaming company, which announced that subscriber numbers increased by 5.9 million globally during the crackdown period, bringing the sum total of subscribers up to 238.4 million. (For those of you without a calculator, that means roughly 3 percent of the planetary population is actively subscribed to Netflix at the moment.) Netflix also stated that “The cancel reaction was low,” and said it succeeded in converting “borrower households” (ugh) into full-fledged subscribers. The company also says people sighed and sucked up its new program that allows users to add outside-the-home members to their plans for $7.99 a month, although that particular olive branch won’t be offered to users in the countries about to face the streaming boot, apparently because they already pay lower prices for the service anyway.
Netflix has been talking about slamming the door on password sharing since pretty much the same moment it realized it had reached a saturation point in most of its markets. (It’s hard, after all, to feed corporate America’s insatiable desire for growth when everybody who’s going to buy your product already has it.) The company hesitated on pulling the trigger on password sharing in the United States for a couple of years, though, as it tested out the program in markets like South America in hopes of finding the most rage-tranquilizing ways to roll it out. The news comes as the company is also continuing to push viewers toward its ad-supported tier, with the company removing its “Basic” ad-free plan earlier today.
