Tek-Bull

Splitflix: Share the Cost of Hulu and Netflix Subscriptions With Other People – Screwing us Over!

Welcome to the beginning of the end, Splitflix just opened up, it gives you the ability to share your online subscriptions for TV and Movie streaming sites like Hulu and Netflix. This is something that we have been doing for a long time now and both Netflix and Hulu know about it, but now that a company is trying to send this sharing on a mass scale, you can expect that both Netflix and Hulu will be implementing services to prevent multiple streaming at the same time.

Online streaming services are extremely appealing to people that don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for their movie and TV Show subscriptions. But the streaming subscriptions can quickly add up. In our home for example, we have Netflix, Showtime, HBO, and Hulu. These services add up to a little over 60 dollars a month, not including Xbox Live and Internet connections fast enough to deliver the streaming service uninterrupted.

Yea, you’re saving money, but you still feel the pinch on your wallet. That’s why a lot of people share their passwords to online streaming services with their friends or roommates. You each pay $10 a month, and you have all of the services that you want. Splitflix is a service allows you to split the cost of your Netflix and Hulu subscriptions with other people.

You simply pay $1 a month, and Splitflix will set you up with an anonymous “buddy” to split the cost of Netflix. Once you are paired up with the other person, you negotiate what each of you are going to pay, how and when they are going to enter into the ‘arrangement’, and other conditions you may set for each other.  Once you are done, you give out your password to the other person and you’ll have access to Netflix and Hulu at half the price.  – until the other person screws you over and steals your credit card information and changes your password/e-mail to keep you out of your own service – but that’s beyond the fact.

A little digging around in the Netflix terms of service you can see that, “sharing” passwords is not completely banned:

BY SHARING THE NETFLIX SERVICE PASSWORD, THE ACCOUNT OWNER AGREES TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR ASSURING THAT HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS COMPLY WITH THE TERMS OF USE AND SUCH ACCOUNT OWNER SHALL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS OF THE HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS.

This technically makes Splitflix legal right now, as in it doesn’t break the terms of service for Netflix or Hulu, but I can imagine that it’s going to be going out of business once Hulu and Netflix update their terms and conditions.

I applaud Splitflix for doing this and making quick money, but companies like Splitflix are the cause that terms and conditions are changed for the worse. Once they are blocked by these services, you can rest assure that our days of sharing services with our friends and roommates are going to be over. By installing a simple – one streaming movie at a time per device – script or code into their servers, we’ll be forced to watch our movies at predestined times. They could even add an option where you have to register one device at a time; which will make it a hassle to share the service with other people. I guess, you might as well enjoy it while it lasts.