Update: Netflix cuts down on simultaneous movie streaming

[majoline]

Link from Lifehacker.com

So what does everyone think?

I'm now seriously rethinking keeping our account because that was one of the main reasons we signed up in the first place.

Comments

[delladea]

I think people under the same roof should all be able to stream no matter what kind of Netflix account they have. Being able to determine who is in the same house and who isn't is a whole other can of worms - do they base it off IP? Registered wireless devices? Have an arbitrary limit of devices you can connect and register?

This is seldom an issue for us personally, as we have one TV in the house and none of us prefer to watch movies sitting at our computer. On occasion my husband has business trips out of town and he'll watch movies on his laptop. We've never had an issue, though we haven't tried streaming from two devices simultaneously recently.

[spaceoperadiva]

I'm wildly jealous of anyone who has an IP service and connection that can handle streaming more than 2 videos at a time. Occasionally we have 2 streams going at once, but not all that often.

If there are people sharing their streaming accounts with people who aren't living in the same house, I think that's a pretty blatant abuse of the service. I've streamed movies on my laptop while on vacation and I'd hate to lose that ability, but OTOH, if this account sharing thing is going on, I can see why Netflix has to crack down on that.

Frankly I'm more worried about the loss of inventory from the streaming library.

[dydan]

The loss of inventory is really a bad situation for Netflix. Over the last year, I have watched the selections dwindle. The quality of what's available seems to be bad 80's movies and a few decent TV series.

The price hikes, the stupid splitting of their services and the poor quality of streaming is going to be the end of Netflix, methinks. Studios have made it abundantly clear that they don't need Netflix nearly as badly as Netflix needs them, and unless Netflix can score some major deals with studios to improve their streaming selection (doubtful), they will go belly-up as users migrate to other platforms with better selections like Amazon Prime and Roku.