Dear Netflix,
No word of a lie, I've been an uninterrupted member of your service since September 22, 2010, the day it launched in Canada. That's over 15 years and I wouldn't be surprised if I was among the first thousand signups in the country. I was living in a shitty apartment in Ottawa's west end and had 5 megabit ADSL Internet. The first thing I watched was the remake of Wall Street with Shia Leboeuf--which you can't see on the service anymore--through my Xbox 360.
I remember how "in the future" it felt. The quality was really good, there was a huge selection to choose from and it just worked. Pick the movie, hit the button and go, even on that ADSL connection that was considered at best middling even then. All for only $7.99 a month! I'd already cut the cable cord earlier a couple years prior, earlier than most, but I remember telling my girlfriend at the time "I'm never going to need cable again."
Fast forward to now. I no longer live in that shitty apartment, I have 1 gigabit fiber Internet and there's an entire streaming industry now, which you helped pioneer and still lead. Instead of $7.99 a month, I now pay $33.88 a month, including an extra user I added for my Mom since you disabled password sharing, something you once encouraged. In fact, that $7.99 a month I used to pay? That's what I'd now have to pay just so my Mom's account doesn't see ads since you now charge more for that, even though I already pay for the Premium tier plan.
I also remember House of Cards. Well, not the last season because come on, who actually watched that? It was your first major Netflix Original show and set a high bar for political drama. New seasons launching were an event, especially since they launched in full on day one so you could binge them if you wanted. Remember that? Good times. It was the first splash of what has since become an absolute torrent of original content, ranging from drama to comedies, documentaries to standup, cartoons to anime. The movies never landed as well as the series, but you offered plenty of both. It's now the overwhelming majority of your catalog and there's more coming than anyone can reasonably keep up with.
So why is it that in recent years, I've found myself watching less and less, to the point where I sometimes go 2 months without logging in? When I do, I sometimes struggle to find something I actually want to start watching between all the "reality" slop, true crime garbage and oh yeah, now shitty fake sports you undoubtedly paid a fortune for. Even when I do find something, most of the time it's badly written, the acting is a toss up and the script needs to restate the plot 3 times for some reason. Oh wait, that's because you're now insisting stuff is written assuming everyone's doom scrolling and not paying attention. It feels like every decision you make is dictated by algorithms rather than for the art and it turns out, that's because they are.
I enthusiastically welcomed the streaming revolution because I loved how you weren't like cable. You still aren't, you're worse now.
There's tons of streaming services now, all with another fee or more vapid, repetitive ads. You all have different apps, none of which work on every platform. Content is fragmented between services, sometimes jumping between services mid-series. You never know if a show you love is going to get cancelled midway through, leaving the story unresolved because some line didn't cross another line (RIP Altered Carbon). Worst of all in your case, prices have continued to go up, even as you report record subscriber growth and profits and even as your content has become more about quantity than quality. Apple TV now reminds me of what you were in the golden years, but even they are starting to slip now. And let's not even start about the pissing match you're in with Paramount over the dumpster fire that is David Zaslav's Warner Bros. Discovery.
So you know what? It's time.
Like many tech savvy people my age, I used to pirate stuff a lot when I was younger because I couldn't afford to buy much. Now I have a good career and am a man of means and I try to pay for content and support it. My rule has been "If it's worth consuming, it's worth paying for." But you know what? Screw that now. The rare time something comes out from you that I think is worth watching, I'm just going to use my buddy's Plex server. He grabs basically everything in the same quality I'd see it on Netflix anyway and if it turns out to be algorithmic slop as it so often does now, at least I won't feel ripped off anymore.
Gabe Newell, one of the founders of Steam creators Valve once said that "piracy is almost always a service problem" and he's right. Some people will just steal because they can but most of the time, people do it because piracy is easier than the legit way. You once were the solution and piracy rates went through the floor. Now more and more people are choosing piracy because you and your compatriots have made it more work to do things the legit way and what they get when they do, it isn't worth it.
Know what I've been using even longer than Netflix? Steam. Know why? Because though it's not a flawless service, I've always felt like my business is respected and the service continues to improve, encouraging me and millions of gamers to support it more. What you're doing is driving away savvy users and as you continue to enshittify the experience, more non-savvy ones will leave too. Getting my Mom and girlfriend onto my buddy's Plex server wasn't hard.
I used to feel guilty about pirating anything because I've always said that if people don't want to pay for stuff, they can't whine when it doesn't get made anymore. But movies and TV? Nah, fuck it. I'm fine with it now and I honestly should have shoved the guilt to the side years ago. Business is earned, not entitled and you haven't been earning it for a long time now. What little you do put out that interests me isn't worth 4 times what I started out paying for it.
You did this to yourselves. You took a loyal and happy user and pushed him to the point of becoming the exact kind of consumer you once courted away from the cable companies. You did it with myopic, short-term, Friedman economic thinking and that always comes back to bite you eventually. You're already drowning in debt and will be up to your ears in it if you actually manage to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. When that goes tits up on you--and it will--maybe then you'll spare a moment to think about the loyal customers you burned with your hubris.
At least you made it surprisingly easy to cancel, so thanks for that I guess.
