From today, keep Netflix password secret, otherwise it will cost you.
All things considered, Canada is undoubtedly the country where Netflix has the highest percentage of subscribers. To reward us for our enthusiasm to subscribe, the giant of the streaming has just included us with New Zealand, Spain and Portugal among the first countries where we will no longer be able to share our password for free. Finished the little gift that we give to our children, to our mother-in-law or to a boyfriend by giving her our Netflix password.
Let’s be understanding, poor Netflix only has 230 million subscribers worldwide. Last year, it generated only $31.6 billion US (42.5 billion Canadian) in revenue for profits of just $4.5 billion US (6 billion Canadian). A real misery! These profits represent exactly the total budget of the city of Montreal for 2023! As for the total annual revenues of Netflix, they represent 20 times the annual revenues of Radio-Canada, TVA and Noovo combined.
In Hollywood, we are far from believing that Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, has just made a good move. The third of the specialists surveyed by the magazine Variety are of the opinion that the new Netflix directive will not change anything, another third are even of the opinion that it will have a negative effect. Only 12% believe that it will allow Netlix to increase the number of its subscribers.
I admit I gave my son-in-law the Netflix password a few years ago. He used it a dozen times. I know this because I get an alert every time it does. I believe he tuned into Netflix more often than me. It’s that the Netflix repertoire does not delight me. I even find it insulting that my friends who live in France have, for the same price that I pay, an infinitely richer and more varied repertoire of films than the one to which I have access. In terms of French cinema, Francophones in Quebec and Canada remain, by far, the poor relations of Netflix.
Not only did Netflix treat the country’s French speakers as a negligible quantity and Canada’s English speakers as if they were mere Americans, but more than any other Internet giant, it undermined our television networks and transformed a part of our audiovisual industry into a service industry.
DANGEROUS IMBALANCE
A few hundred technicians and craftsmen have found paying jobs in the production centers that the American giants have set up in the country, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver, but the imbalance they have created in the industry has weakened the producers. Canadians by increasing their production costs while reducing the purchasing power of our television channels.
The situation will continue until Netflix and company contribute their fair share for the production of original Canadian programming. In the meantime, why don’t we think twice before extending our subscriptions to these ogres?
