Everyone has Netflix these days. Well, it feels as though a lot of people do. It's now available in pretty much every country in the world except China, and in the United Kingdom alone around 6 million people subscribe to it. It has a reasonable range of films - most of which are a couple of years old, but there are a few new ones, often distributed by Netflix itself - and a number of television programmes that are well worth a watch, such as The Crown, Stranger Things, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Good Place. You can subscribe to your first month for free if you haven't done so yet to see what you think.
It's not a massive outlay every month, but as ever with these things, it can mount up over the year. It's also worth remembering that if your broadband limits you to a certain amount of downloaded data per month, you could end up paying extra charges to your Internet Service Provider, so watch out for that. The service has three plans, and if you subscribe, it's definitely worth checking your account to see which of the three you're on to see if you can save a little. The plans are:
Basic: This costs £5.99 per month, and allows you to watch on one screen at a time. There's no High Definition or Ultra High Definition available, but if your internet isn't the quickest, this might not be something that bothers you much.
Standard: This costs £7.99 per month, and allows you to watch on two different screens at a time, meaning that if you have a flatmate, you could share the cost with them, which would make it better value than the basic package at around £4 each per month. You can watch things in High Definition.
Premium: This is the most expensive of the three plans, and costs £9.99 per month. It's probably best for families, but people who live in shared houses can make significant savings on this plan compared to the basic one if they're willing to share an account and the cost. You can watch on on four different screens at a time, so if you have three flatmates, it'd only cost about £2.50 each per month between the four of you, and HD and UHD is available.
Now, technically it is possible to share your account details with friends in other households and split the cost with them, but it might not be advisable. The CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, did say in 2016 that "we love people sharing Netflix. That's a positive thing, not a negative thing." But these comments were later clarified by Neil Hunt, the service's Chief Product Manager, who said:
"We expect that Netflix is a household level purchase, and that sharing with members of the household is a reasonable thing to do... The terms of use is sharing within the household and that's our expectation. I don't think we are obsessed with enforcing compliance with a one-household-per-account constraint. Because, in reality, it's a high-value programme, so that's what people are going to do."So, you can make of that what you will, I suppose. Ultimately, even if you don't split the cost of one of these plans, you would still save money compared to buying DVDs or Blu-rays, or going to see something at the cinema.
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