jenpry seldin herald
Niklas Terki
do you offer access to Netflix in your listing? If so do you use your own account? Pay for another account? Make them sign in with THEIR account? I have a Netflix account myself and a ROKU I can hook up -- I just today got my first inquiry about Netflix in the unit. I'm wondering how others do it.
I have an additional device account, one for guests. If a guest doesn't have their own account, they can request me to set up access to ours as a guest viewer. Although after 2 years and many bookings, I have had only 2 requests for me to set them up. Most have their own account these days.
We have a guest account for Netflix and Hulu and an old iPhone with nothing else on it signed in for guests to cast to the tv, via google chrome-cast. Old fashioned but does the job at low cost. (We have no tv service.)
Hi Emilia, I'll just be starting to offer Netflix for my guest this coming month and thinking of the same set-up as yours (guest will have access to my account, but with a different user profile). I'd like to ask if you had any instances where your guests have messed with the other profiles on your Netflix account. If yes, what did you do? Or if not, what have you done to prevent this.
@Jose-Feliciano0, just this week I noticed the Grinch was watched on my specific Netflix profile and there were two young children staying in one of my Airbnbs at that time. It doesn't bother me and doesn't happen often. No one has ever messed with my settings or anything like that. I would say it is more frustrating when they log out of my account and into their own. I have to check every time I am turning over the space for a new guest that Netflix is correctly logged into the right account. I would never give my password to a guest so if they get logged out it would require me going over to the apartment to log them back in (luckily, no one has asked me to do that.)
Hi Jose, So I'm a little behind on this thread & I've been looking into all this stuff with Netflix & if you offer up your own account could the guest potentially mess with the other accounts on it. Anyway, their is a way you can lock your other profiles so they would only have access to the one you want them to have..
I have a "guest profile" for Netflix/Hulu/Amazon but it is still my account. The account requires a password to be modified in any way, including ordering movies that are not included in the subscription so there's no way guests could change or charge anything.
The only issue I had once was someone signed in on their own account, then messaged me claiming that someone was watching stuff on their account after they checked out. We didn't have any guests during the time they claimed this was happening and we had logged them out anyways, so I think they had left their account logged in elsewhere.
@Kelly1126 I have the Netflix account that allows for streaming on 4 devices at once. I just leave the account signed in. Same with Amazon: I'm actually not sure how many people can log in at once, but there has never been a conflict, maybe because Amazon Prime is pretty poor in Canada and there isn't much to watch. Some people choose to use their own account, but I do provide mine also so they can use it if they want.
We have Smart TVs and/or Roku's so that guests can access their own accounts. We remind them to sign out when they leave. We've also been using YouTubeTV instead of cable TV in some properties. So far, so good. The savings are great. Good luck with whatever you decide!
Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph as a DVD-by-mail service. The idea came after Hastings was charged a late fee for a movie rental. Customers could subscribe to receive DVDs by mail. The company later expanded to streaming and now has millions of subscribers.
The company at the time struggled with two fundamental problems in their business model. One was that because the DVD was sent via mail, it would take anything between one day to 4 days for the shipment to reach the subscriber. Even though people were likely to try Netflix, conversion to repeat rentals was low. Secondly, people would far more inclined to rent out the latest releases. For the company to break even on the cost of purchasing a DVD to rent-out, they would have to generate 15-20 rentals for each DVD.
Secondly, to enable maximum utilisation of their DVD content catalogue, the company created their movie recommendation system. Through Cinematch, Netflix would recommend shows for their subscribers to watch. The point for this was to alleviate pressure for DVD rentals away from new releases, to a more uniform renting out of their content library. This solution has over the years become considerably sophisticated, and drives how customers experience Netflix and how the company makes decisions when acquiring new content.
Netflix put further pressure on competition when they announced the launch of their streaming service in January 2007, as Watch Now. At the time the streaming service was expected to be of use only for power users with broadband internet connections, which were not all that common at the time. Users were required to have a 1 mbps internet connection to be able to stream movies, with a 3mbps connection required for streaming DVD-quality films. Subscribers under the $17.99 plan had access to 18 hours of streaming content. Video delivery was through a special browser applet that subscribers would have to install. By 2008 however Netflix had given access to unlimited video streaming for subscribers to its biggest plan .
Prioritising building a robust technical infrastructure has helped Netflix keep their first-mover advantage. Oftentimes the first-mover advantage is squandered by technology companies who have to make way for businesses that solve the problem more efficiently. Netflix, however, by relying on a solid content and technical team, has managed to keep its competitive advantage since the launch of its streaming video service.
As the company started working towards building a streaming video solution, they also started to develop solutions for streaming video through hardware platforms. In 2004/05 the company was considering working with contract manufacturers on DVD disc drives with a video processor, which could download video content over the internet, and then stream it on TV. This model was similar to TiVo, which enabled TV owners to record TV shows on a disc. This was however shelved as competition with Blockbuster intensified and Netflix had to put resources into engaging in a pricing war with the market leader.
In 2008 Netflix began work on a device for streaming videos. Netflix started to work on developing a video player to connect to television, through which streaming video can be played over the internet. However Reed Hastings was concerned that potential partnerships with consumer electronic platforms would be negatively impacted by having their own platform. Roku was subsequently spun out as a separate company.
For much history of Netflix has had to face questions from cable TV providers whose content it would license, movie studios for movie licensing, as it presented a competition to their respective business models. Being perceived as a threat by the device manufacturers with which it was seeking to partner in the early stages of its streaming video business would hardly have severely limited its growth options. For this reason Netflix decided to spin out the Netflix Player team as a separate company.
In August 2008 Netflix experienced a major database corruption, and could not ship out their DVDs for three days. This was the stimulus that led to Netflix opting to host their business logic on the cloud. This cloud migration would take place for the main part in the period of 2010-2011, and would only be completed in 2015, when the company finally setup its billing infrastructure, the most sensitive part of its business operation, on the cloud. The complete shift to the cloud was a pathbreaker in the tech industry. Throughout the history Netflix, it has built a highly robust cloud infrastructure, which has enabled the company to scale up seamlessly as it has seen exponential growth and as it has expanded to 190+ countries.
As more people began tuning into Netflix, content providers found that Netflix helped build audiences for their shows. Cable networks making past seasons and episodes of their television series available on Netflix enabled content discovery. Customers discovering quality cable content on Netflix helped would later tune into the currently airing episodes of the series. This helped boost ratings for television shows such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men, both produced by AMC. Ratings for Season 5 of Breaking Bad were more than double those of Season 1, and many times the ratings of Season 1, largely helped by the audience that Netflix generated for AMC. Netflix helped users catch up to currently broadcasting series, and enabled networks to focus on creating quality content with the knowledge that even a small initial following would convert soon enough to larger audiences.
One of the major issues for Netflix has been credential sharing, where users share their passwords with each other. Recently Netflix has been slowly rolling out a feature to tackle this. In Netflix password sharing crackdown, it has started to prompt messages to some users that it suspects are accessing or streaming on borrowed accounts
In 2011, in a move aimed at generating revenues for further investment into their video catalog, Netflix made major changes to their business model. The company separated memberships for DVD rental and online streaming businesses, getting users to buy different subscriptions. Buying both subscriptions would increase the cost for customer by $6 per month, from $10 for the single membership which included both DVD-on-mail and Streaming video, to $8 each for the two services. Netflix also proposed spinning off the DVD business as a separate entity named Qwikster. As a result of this abrupt price hike, 800,000 left the service, forcing Netflix to partially reverse the decision.
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