Netflix to help cancel inactive memberships

If you have a forgotten Netflix account that has been racking up charges, never fear, Netflix will take care of it. 

On May 21 Eddy Wu, Director of Product Innovation posted in the company blog that they will be helping customers by cancelling inactive accounts and saving people money. 

If you haven't watched anything in the first year of getting an account or haven't watched anything in two years Netflix will send you a notice. If they don't hear back from you, they will cancel your account. Also, if you want to renew your account in the 10 months after cancellation they will have kept all your preferences.

So what's in it for Netflix? Let's go over it a bit. 

In the aforementioned blog post, they mention that the number of users that fall into that criteria is less than half of one percent. Netflix membership has risen to somewhere north of 180 million so this could be no higher than 900,000 accounts. That sounds like a lot of money and it's certainly not insignificant, however, not every one of those accounts will necessarily be cancelled just based on the process itself. 

They also didn't mention that in the first quarter of 2020 their membership grew by a net 15.8 million accounts. While this may inflated by the pandemic bump, it is still wildly greater than any number they would lose from these auto-cancellations.

What I love about this move by Netflix is the inflated appearance of good-will. 

Are they saving people money? Yes. 

Was it an altruistic move on Netflix's part? Of course not. 

It is fantastic PR especially in the ever growing streaming service war against other growing competitors like Disney+, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Apple TV+.

This is great press for Netflix and could become a deciding factor when mulling over which streaming services people want to carry on watching.

If it came down to one service, which one would you keep?

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