A proposed state tax in Massachusetts on streaming video services could increase prices for popular platforms like Netflix and Hulu, as the 5 percent fee would support approximately 200 community access cable channels struggling due to declining cable subscriptions. The Boston Globe reports: In July, the Joint Committee on Advanced Information Technology held hearings on legislation filed by Democratic State Representative Joan Meschino and Republican Representative Mathew J. Muratore, both of Plymouth. Their bill would require streaming video companies to pay a 5 percent fee on the gross revenues generated in the state. The estimated $65 million a year raised by the fee would support roughly 200 community access channels, the most in any state. The community channels are run by nonprofit organizations or town governments, and funded by cable TV companies, which are assessed a fee by local governments for the right to run their cables through city property. The cable companies pass the cost on to subscribers.

But subscriptions are plummeting as US consumers abandon pay TV for streaming services. Cable and satellite subscribers now number about 70 million, down more than 25 percent from 95.5 million a decade ago, according to Leichtman Research Group, a New Hampshire research and analysis company specializing in media, entertainment, and broadband industries. "The next three to five years it's really going to dry up even more so," said Muratore. Meschino said citizens can't afford to lose access to community media channels, because so many local newspapers have shut down. "There's literally no other way to consume that sort of hyperlocal programming," Meschino said.

About a dozen US states levy sales taxes on consumers' streaming video bills. But Meschino said that sales tax money goes into each state's general fund. Instead, she wants the streaming fee to be dedicated entirely to support for community media services, just like the fee paid by traditional cable TV companies. Some or all of the fees would likely be passed on to consumers. Gauthier estimates that a typical household's costs could rise about $2.40 a month, spread among several streaming networks. "Maybe it'll be 75 cents for your Amazon," he said. "Maybe it'll be 80 cents for your Disney."

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Hollywood executives insist it is "just not realistic" to pay actors -- 87 percent of whom earn less than $26,000 -- more, they are spending lavishly on AI programs. While entertainment firms like Disney have declined to go into specifics about the nature of their investments in artificial intelligence, job postings and financial disclosures reviewed by The Intercept reveal new details about the extent of these companies' embrace of the technology. In one case, Netflix is offering as much as $900,000 for a single AI product manager.

[...] Netflix's posting for a $900,000-a-year AI product manager job makes clear that the AI goes beyond just the algorithms that determine what shows are recommended to users. The listing points to AI's uses for content creation: "Artificial Intelligence is powering innovation in all areas of the business," including by helping them to "create great content." Netflix's AI product manager posting alludes to a sprawling effort by the business to embrace AI, referring to its "Machine Learning Platform" involving AI specialists "across Netflix."

A research section on Netflix's website describes its machine learning platform, noting that while it was historically used for things like recommendations, it is now being applied to content creation. "Historically, personalization has been the most well-known area, where machine learning powers our recommendation algorithms. We're also using machine learning to help shape our catalog of movies and TV shows by learning characteristics that make content successful. We use it to optimize the production of original movies and TV shows in Netflix's rapidly growing studio."

Google's newest proposed web standard is... DRM? Over the weekend the Internet got wind of this proposal for a "Web Environment Integrity API. " From a report: The explainer is authored by four Googlers, including at least one person on Chrome's "Privacy Sandbox" team, which is responding to the death of tracking cookies by building a user-tracking ad platform right into the browser. The intro to the Web Integrity API starts out: "Users often depend on websites trusting the client environment they run in. This trust may assume that the client environment is honest about certain aspects of itself, keeps user data and intellectual property secure, and is transparent about whether or not a human is using it."

The goal of the project is to learn more about the person on the other side of the web browser, ensuring they aren't a robot and that the browser hasn't been modified or tampered with in any unapproved ways. The intro says this data would be useful to advertisers to better count ad impressions, stop social network bots, enforce intellectual property rights, stop cheating in web games, and help financial transactions be more secure. Perhaps the most telling line of the explainer is that it "takes inspiration from existing native attestation signals such as [Apple's] App Attest and the [Android] Play Integrity API." Play Integrity (formerly called "SafetyNet") is an Android API that lets apps find out if your device has been rooted.

Root access allows you full control over the device that you purchased, and a lot of app developers don't like that. So if you root an Android phone and get flagged by the Android Integrity API, several types of apps will just refuse to run. You'll generally be locked out of banking apps, Google Wallet, online games, Snapchat, and some media apps like Netflix. [...] Google wants the same thing for the web. Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an "environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a "third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed "IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted.

Netflix is bringing password-sharing crackdown to consumers in India and every other market starting today, the global streaming giant said after a limited rollout of the restriction helped the firm sign up nearly 6 million subscribers in the quarter ending June. From a report: The streaming giant said it will start to address account sharing between households in almost all of its remaining countries starting Thursday. Netflix, which once supported the practice of account password-sharing, now finds it posing complex challenges to its business prospects.

It began testing the restriction last year, much to many subscribers' chagrin, and expanded it to a number of other countries including Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and the U.S. in 2023. In some aforementioned markets, Netflix allowed those sharing the password to pay extra to accommodate their friends.

A year after its largest quarterly loss and a significant drop in subscribers, Netflix has made a remarkable recovery by adding 5.9 million global subscribers in the second quarter of 2023, surpassing analyst expectations. TechCrunch reports: The subscriber addition far exceeds industry guidance; analysts forecasted an increase of 1.7 million subs. Netflix ended Q1 with 232.5 million users. Netflix's quarterly earnings results arrive a few hours after news broke out that the streamer dropped its basic plan in the U.S. and the U.K.

Netflix's significant subscriber gain this quarter reflects the impact of its paid sharing rules. Netflix wrote in its letter to shareholders, "In May, we successfully launched paid sharing in 100+ countries, representing more than 80% of our revenue base." The company added that today it's rolling out paid sharing to "almost all the remaining countries," including Croatia, Kenya, Indonesia and India. Netflix reported $8.2 billion in revenue and a net income of $1.5 billion.

With no formal announcement, Netflix removed its $9.99 "Basic" subscription tier for anybody trying to sign up for a new account or resubscribe in the U.S. and UK. From a report: Now your two options are to pay $5.50 more per month for the "Standard" plan, or otherwise suffer through constant ad interruptions with what's now been dubbed "Standard with ads."

All the changes are listed on the service's help center page. The company noted that the Basic plan "is no longer available for new or rejoining members. If you are currently on the Basic plan, you can remain on this plan until you change plans or cancel your account." Netflix pulled the same move in Canada last month, again without any official announcement. The company has been extra cagey about its latest subscription plan shakeup, which could lead to some rather nasty surprises for anybody who leaves Netflix but comes back later hoping to sign up for the $10 ad-free option.

Disney, Netflix, and other media and entertainment giants are pushing back against the FTC's "click to cancel" proposal (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) that would make it easier for people to cancel streaming, gaming, and other services. Insider reports: Companies of all stripes have angered consumers by making services all too easy to sign up for but often confoundingly difficult to cancel, with gyms and news outlets considered among the worst offenders. The FTC has gone after individual companies; it recently sued Amazon, alleging the etailer "tricked" people into signing up for Amazon Prime. That followed the FTC's proposal in March for a regulation that's intended "to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up." The policy would cover providers of both digital and physical subscriptions, from streamers and gym memberships to phone companies and cable TV distributors. The new rule would require companies to offer a simple mechanism for users to cancel subscriptions the same way they signed up. For example, you wouldn't have to cancel a service in person or over the phone if you signed up for it online. "I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to cancel subscriptions I never wanted, let alone the cost!" one person wrote in a comment to the FTC.

The Internet & Television Association, which counts Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery as members, said in its public comment that the proposed reg is so vague, it would lead marketers to be excessive in their disclosures, leaving consumers "inundated" and "confused." The reg would even infringe on its members' freedom of speech, the association argued. "The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First Amendment," the association wrote. Sirius XM wrote in its comments that one proposed requirement -- that companies maintain records of phone calls with customers -- would cost the company "several million" dollars a year to comply with. The Entertainment Software Association, the video gaming trade organization, noted that the FTC's proposed disclosure requirements "would interfere with game play and customer enjoyment." The ESA wrote that "most consumers understand autorenewal offers and are knowing and willing participants in the marketplace" and that letting customers cancel immediately would prevent member companies from offering them alternative plans or discounts. The ESA was joined in its comments by the Digital Media Association and Motion Picture Association, whose members include Netflix, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Universal Pictures. The FTC will examine the feedback it's received through public comment before considering a final rule.

A new series in China tells the story of a scrappy startup developing the advanced chipmaking technology that multinational trade sanctions today are keeping out of the country. From a report: Airing on Alibaba's Netflix-like Youku from Monday, My Chinese Chip hits on a priority issue for the Beijing government -- semiconductor leadership and self-sufficiency -- and depicts a state-supported firm successfully building lasers for deep ultraviolet lithography machines. An escalating trade war between the US and China has barred the best such DUV gear, provided by ASML, from being sold in the Asian country. My Chinese Chip shows a domestic company overcoming a plethora of challenges to nevertheless succeed. Its trailer opens with a single line in English: "We are executing a lithography machine trading war against China's government." The title can also be read as a pun on My Chinese Heart, as "chip" and "heart" sound the same in Chinese. Its official name in English is The Best Chip.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewScientist: Netflix researchers have created a new type of AI-powered green-screen technology that can produce realistic visual effects for film and television in real time. Green-screen technology is routinely used to capture footage of actors that can then be inserted in the foreground of virtual or prerecorded scenes. To do this, actors are filmed against a bright green background, which is easily isolated and removed digitally. This process can be done automatically with reasonable accuracy, such as in television weather forecasts, but it can be thrown by items of green clothing or by transparent or fine objects, like wisps of hair. When greater accuracy is needed in films or television series, specialist operators tweak settings manually, sometimes requiring hours to perfect a shot.

In a bid to create a technique that is both fast and accurate, Netflix has come up with a method it calls Magenta Green Screen (MGS). Actors are filmed against a background of bright green LEDs while being lit from the front with red and blue ones, which together create a magenta glow (see video, [here]). Because digital cameras work by taking an individual red, green and blue value for each pixel, this technique has the effect of creating a green channel that records only the background, with the foreground appearing black, and red and blue channels that record only the foreground, leaving the background looking black. Together these create the magenta and green look. Film editors can replace the green channel in real time, realistically and instantly placing the actors in the foreground of another scene, with even potentially tricky areas, such as transparent bottles or the area around strands of hair, working without problems.

But there is a problem with the method. Because the foreground is only recorded in blue and red, it leaves the actors looking magenta-tinted. To solve this, Netflix uses artificial intelligence to put the full range of color back into the foreground, using a photograph of the actors lit normally as a reference to create a realistic-looking green channel. This AI works quickly, but not yet in real time, although fast techniques such as averaging the red and blue channels to create an approximation of a green channel work effectively enough for the director to monitor while filming.

Instagram's new Twitter competitor called Threads launched today on the web, providing an early look at what to expect from the app that will launch on iOS and Android tomorrow. You can view the web interface here. The Verge reports: Meta briefly made Threads available on the web before pulling profiles offline a few hours later. The Verge was able to access Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's first thread (is that what we call them?!) using the web app, and many other brands and creators including Netflix, Gary Vee, and Instagram.

The web interface is fairly basic right now for viewing threads, with options to like, comment, repost, and share -- all prompting you to download the mobile app for the time being. If you're in an unsupported country, like markets in the EU, then you'll only be able to view threads right now. Much like Twitter, you can view an account's main posts in one section and the full reply history in another.

Fediverse integration won't be available immediately at the launch of Threads, but it's clear Instagram is looking to add this soon. Profiles include an Instagram username and link, with a threads.net label that includes the following description: "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @zuck@threads.net."

Tessa Kaur, writing at The Gamer: This week, Disney removed a film called Crater from Disney Plus, which had been released on May 12, 2023. This means it was on the streaming platform for just 48 days, or about seven weeks. Disney hasn't said why, but it seems most likely that it didn't perform well enough and the company decided to remove it to write down the value of its "content assets," therefore lowering their taxes. It's all about the money, and always has been, and there are unfortunate consequences that come with this.

Disney isn't the only streamer that's guilty of this -- every streaming service, including Netflix and HBO Max (now just Max), has taken shows and movies off their platforms without warning. Willow was cancelled and removed from Disney, as was the well-loved Single Drunk Female from Hulu. HBO pulled Westworld and Snowpiercer. Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies was cancelled and pulled from Paramount Plus just last month. It seems like anything could be pulled at any time, and that sucks.

It's bad enough that streaming services are cancelling shows left and right because they don't meet arbitrary sales targets, but when they are pulled from these platforms, many of them disappear forever. A lot of these shows are made for streaming, never aired on cable, and were never physically released. Bigger prestige shows like Westworld and Snowpiercer appeared on cable originally and are more likely to have Blu-ray releases, but those Disney shows are gone. There is no legal way to watch them anymore, and these companies are not interested in even selling you access.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is taking a hard look at how much the company's Hollywood studio spends on original TV programming. From a report: In recent weeks, he has asked executives for detailed budget analyses of some of their biggest shows, according to people familiar with the matter, scrutinizing the studio's ballooning costs and mixed track record with audiences. The world's largest online retailer is engaged in a companywide cost-cutting program, with plans to eliminate at least 27,000 jobs. Across Amazon, Jassy has also jettisoned 37 different projects deemed unnecessary.

The Hollywood studio, which has spent tens of billions of dollars on original programming over the last decade, is an obvious place to look for savings. Last year, Amazon spent $7 billion on original shows, licensed programs and sports, up from $5 billion the year before. Only Netflix and Disney spend more on streaming. In the past nine months, Amazon has released at least a half-dozen pricey series that failed to deliver huge audiences. Daisy Jones & the Six, The Power, Dead Ringers and The Peripheral all cost more than $100 million to produce but failed to crack Nielsen's list of the 10 most-watched streaming programs in the US. Even The Rings of Power ($400 million-plus), a show that attracted a large audience, failed to hold on to most of its viewers over the course of the season, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Consumers are winning from the streaming revolution but across most of Hollywood, the businesses churning out TV and movies are losing. From a report: Services such as Netflix, Disney+, Paramount+ and Max have become the default entertainment options for homes across America rather than cable, saving many consumers money. For the titans of Hollywood, that shift has been costly. Traditional media and entertainment companies have reported losses of more than $20 billion combined since early 2020 on their direct-to-consumer streaming businesses. Netflix, which brings in profits, is an exception, but the rest of the industry is wondering: While consumers love streaming, is it actually a good business?

Investors now care about profitability rather than growth, a change that makes finding new revenue streams and retaining customers critical. Studios that for years were able to splurge on content to feed viewers' insatiable appetite for new shows and films now must pull back to make the math work. The ad market is weakening, many companies have laid off staff to save money and Hollywood writers are on strike. Market values for Paramount Global, Comcast, Walt Disney and Netflix are down more than $280 billion combined since the end of 2020. Warner Bros. Discovery is worth about half of its total value since its 2022 trading debut as a combined company. The declines have come after many of the stocks rose during the early part of the pandemic, when consumers were stuck at home and hungry for entertainment.

Along with FaceTime support and a redesigned Control Center, Apple is adding support for VPN apps in tvOS 17. MacRumors reports: VPN apps could allow for Apple TV users to watch geo-restricted content from any location, such as the U.S. version of Netflix in another country. In its tvOS 17 press release, however, Apple focused on how the VPN apps can benefit enterprise and education users, so it is possible that Apple could restrict usage of the apps.

Apple: "Third-party VPN support, which enables developers to create VPN apps for Apple TV. This can benefit enterprise and education users wanting to access content on their private networks, allowing Apple TV to be a great office and conference room solution in even more places."

According to research company Antenna, Netflix's password crackdown in the U.S. has resulted in the "four single largest days of U.S. user sign-ups since January 2019, when Antenna first began tracking the metric," reports Variety. "On May 23, Netflix began notifying U.S. customers that users on their accounts who live outside their households would need to be added as an 'extra member' (or get their own subscriptions)." From the report: Based on the most current Antenna data available, Netflix average daily sign-ups reached 73,000 from May 25-28, a 102% increase from the prior 60-day average. That was more than the spikes in subscriber sign-ups Antenna recorded during the initial U.S. COVID-19 lockdowns in March and April 2020. Netflix U.S. cancelations also increased over May 25-28 -- a phenomenon the company told investors it expected -- but those were less than the number of sign-ups, according to Antenna. The ratio of sign-ups to cancelations since May 23 increased 25.6% compared with the previous 60-day period.

In the U.S., Netflix has told customers they must buy an "extra member" at an additional $7.99/month for anyone who doesn't live with them that currently uses their account. The streamer has said it will start blocking devices that attempt to access a Netflix account without having legitimate account access. According to New York-based Antenna, its estimates are based on millions of permission-based, consumer opt-in, raw transaction records, which are sourced "from a variety of data collection partners." The data includes online purchase receipts, credit, debit and banking data, and "bill-scrape data."

TV's streaming model is broken. It's also not going away. For Hollywood, figuring that out will be a horror show. From a report: Across the town, there's despair and creative destruction and all sorts of countervailing indicators. Certain shows that were enthusiastically green-lit two years ago probably wouldn't be made now. Yet there are still streamers burning mountains of cash to entertain audiences that already have too much to watch. Netflix has tightened the screws and recovered somewhat, but the inarguable consensus is that there is still a great deal of pain to come as the industry cuts back, consolidates, and fumbles toward a more functional economic framework. The high-stakes Writers Guild of America strike has focused attention on Hollywood's labor unrest, but the really systemic issue is streaming's busted math. There may be no problem more foundational than the way the system monetizes its biggest hits: It doesn't.

Just ask Shawn Ryan. In April, the veteran TV producer's latest show, the spy thriller The Night Agent, became the fifth-most-watched English-language original series in Netflix's history, generating 627 million viewing hours in its first four weeks. As it climbed to the heights of such platform-defining smashes as Stranger Things and Bridgerton, Ryan wondered how The Night Agent's success might be reflected in his compensation. "I had done the calculations. Half a billion hours is the equivalent of over 61 million people watching all ten episodes in 18 days. Those shows that air after the Super Bowl -- it's like having five or ten of them. So I asked my lawyer, 'What does that mean?'" recalls Ryan. As it turns out, not much. "In my case, it means that I got paid what I got paid. I'll get a little bonus when season two gets picked up and a nominal royalty fee for each additional episode that gets made. But if you think I'm going out and buying a private jet, you're way, way off."

Ryan says he'll probably make less money from The Night Agent than he did from The Shield, the cop drama he created in 2002, even though the latter ran on the then-nascent cable channel FX and never delivered Super Bowl numbers. "The promise was that if you made the company billions, you were going to get a lot of millions," he says. "That promise has gone away." Nobody is crying for Ryan, of course, and he wouldn't want them to. ("I'm not complaining!" he says. "I'm not unaware of my position relative to most people financially.") But he has a point. Once, in a more rational time, there was a direct relationship between the number of people who watched a show and the number of jets its creator could buy. More viewers meant higher ad rates, and the biggest hits could be sold to syndication and international markets. The people behind those hits got a cut, which is why the duo who invented Friends probably haven't flown commercial since the 1990s. Streaming shows, in contrast, have fewer ads (or none at all) and are typically confined to their original platforms forever. For the people who make TV, the connection between ratings and reward has been severed.

MoviePass is back thanks to MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes, who was fired from the company in 2018 for questioning the sustainability of its business model. "Under the company's new points-based system, you can pay $10 per month to watch one to three movies at any of the 4,000 participating theaters throughout the US," reports The Verge. From the report: In addition to the $10 / month Basic plan, MoviePass offers three more expensive subscription options: a $20 / month Standard plan for three to seven movies per month, a $30 / month Premium plan for five to 11 movies per month, and a $40 / month Pro for up to 30 movies per month. There's a separate, more expensive subscription for customers in Southern California and the New York metro area. The reason why each tier includes a range of movies you can watch has to do with the way MoviePass' new credits system works. Every tier offers a different number of credits that you can redeem on movies each month, with Basic having the least number of credits and the Pro plan having the most.

According to MoviePass, a film's credit value can fluctuate depending on a number of factors, including the time of day and day of the week you want to watch it. Based on tweets from customers who tested the service, credit costs have changed without warning and can vary significantly across showings. If you don't use up all your credits, MoviePass says it will roll them over to the next month, allowing you to have a maximum of two months' worth of unused credits in your account to use at a later date. Once you sign up for the service, you'll receive a MoviePass card within 10 to 15 business days that you'll need to use at supported theaters. The sustainability of MoviePass started to crumble in 2017 when it began offering customers unlimited movie-watching for just $9.95 per month. The seemingly too-good-to-be-true pricing ultimately resulted in the company's bankruptcy two years later.

Additionally, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against MoviePass, alleging that the company had misled investors about the viability of its business model.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Commercial Earth-observation companies collect an unprecedented volume of images and data every single day, but purchasing even a single satellite image can be cumbersome and time-intensive. SkyFi, a two-year-old startup, is looking to change that with an app and API that makes ordering a satellite image as easy as a click of a few buttons on a smartphone or computer. SkyFi doesn't build or operate satellites; instead, it partners with over a dozen companies to deliver various kinds of satellite images -- including optical, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and hyperspectral -- directly to the customer via a web and mobile app. A SkyFi user can task a satellite to capture a specific image or choose from a library of previously captured images. Some of SkyFi's partners include public companies like Satellogic, as well as newer startups like Umbra and Pixxel.

The startup is taking a very 21st-century approach to the Earth observation industry. SkyFi co-founders Bill Perkins and Luke Fischer emphasize that their company is focused on user experience and creating a seamless purchasing process for the consumer, contrasted sharply with what Fischer called "business models based on the '80s and '90s." "We're very customer-focused," Bill Perkins said on the TerraWatch Space podcast. "The industry is science-focused and product-focused."

The startup is targeting three types of customers: individual consumers; large enterprise customers, from verticals spanning agriculture, mining, finance, insurance and more; and U.S. government and defense customers. SkyFi's solution is appealing even these latter customers, who may have plenty of experience working with satellite companies already and could afford the high costs in the traditional marketplace. "Even though we have companies that are multibillion dollar corporations using our platform that could afford to have a multimillion dollar contract year with [any] public satellite company, they're being more cost conscious and that's where this offering of SkyFi comes in," Fischer said. "There is no and will never be a 'contact sales' button on SkyFi," Fischer said. "Because it just was ruining the industry." "I think of SkyFi as the Netflix of the geospatial world, where I think of Umbra, Satellogic and Maxar as the movie studios of the world," Fischer said. "I just want them to produce great content and put it on the platform."

Netflix's controversial password sharing crackdown just hit the US. From a report: In addition to the US, Netflix confirmed it will also be rolling out the crackdown across all regions around the world such as the UK, France, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Singapore, Australia, among others. "Netflix account is for use by one household," the company wrote in the post. "Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are -- at home, on the go, on holiday -- and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices." Netflix broadened its crackdown in early February to include countries like Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain, in addition to the test countries of Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru. It previously said "a broad rollout" of the policy would hit this quarter.

Netflix has held talks with UK telecoms groups that carry the streaming group's service ahead of a crackdown on account sharing expected later this month. From a report: The US group, which has said the free use of its platform has hit its ability to invest in new TV and films, plans to start warning customers over account-sharing violations in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the situation. Telecoms groups that use Netflix as part of bundled TV content have held meetings in the past week over the planned warnings, people familiar with the talks said. Companies such as Sky, BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk offer Netflix as part of bundled deals on broadband and TV content. But those close to the talks said there was a risk of complaints from some subscribers, many of whom have grown accustomed to sharing their account details with family and friends, activity to which the company had previously turned a blind eye. One person described it as being a "good partner" to groups that offer the service as part of their subscriptions. Telecoms companies' call centres are likely to field questions and complaints once the plans are enacted, according to a person familiar with the issue, which has meant that they have needed close co-operation with Netflix.