Netflix: finished the little gift we give to our children

< /p> UPDATE DAY

Starting today, keep Netflix's password a secret or it will cost you.

All things considered, Canada is without doubts the country where Netflix has the highest percentage of subscribers. To reward us for our enthusiasm to subscribe, the streaming gianthas 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 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 just US$31.6 billion (C42.5 billion) in revenue for profits of barely US$4.5 billion (C6 billion). A real misery! These profits represent exactly the total budget of the city of Montreal for 2023! As for Netflix's total annual revenues, 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 , just made a good move. The third of specialists surveyed by Variety magazineare 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 it will help Netlix increase its subscriber base.

I confess to having given the Netflix password to my son-in-law a few years ago. He used it a dozen times. I know because I get an alert every time he does. I believe he tuned into Netflix more often than I did. 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 artisans have found gainful employment in the production centers that the American giants have established in the country, particularly in Toronto and Vancouver, but the imbalance they have created in the industry has weakened Canadian producers by increasing their production costs while reducing the power of purchase 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?