The TV series are nice, but this is where we need to dump the party hype. And so, as Netflix prepares to crackdown on passwords, it’s inviting its subscribers to get off the sofa and get moving. This weekend, the streaming platform made 46 training videos available to its audience for a total of 30 hours of programming. They range from yoga to the basic principles of fitness to high-intensity exercise and iron abs training.
An initiative born thanks to an alliance with Nike Training Club, the sports app of the sportswear giant, which offers its most popular trainers such as Nike Kirsty Godso and Betina Gozo. Another 43 videos will be released throughout 2023. The virtual gym is open all over the world and lessons will be available to subscribers in different languages, including Italian. For the famous sportswear brand, it’s a way to counter competition from Peloton: the app, linked to the expensive spinning bike that’s been making waves during Covid, has nearly three million subscribers versus 1.8 million Ntc, but by From now on, the sports giant will have access to Netflix’s 223 million subscribers.
The announcement came to sweeten confirmation that 2023 will be the year of Netflix’s dreaded crackdown on shared passwords. The streaming fitness test is actually one of the weapons the platform has taken on to curb and potentially win back paying subscriptions.
Netflix has dominated the streaming market for years, but as of last spring, that dominance has faltered. In April, Netflix reported losing 200,000 subscriptions for the first time in over a decade, despite the return of popular shows like Stranger Things and Ozark, followed by another 970,000 in July. “The large number of households sharing a subscription, combined with the competition, works against profits,” Netflix said at the time.
There are around a hundred million Netflix viewers who use relatives and friends’ passwords, and it’s not clear how the platform can use the crackdown threatened: the most accepted hypothesis is that the streaming giant will use IP addresses to identify customers “free riders” and then threaten with blocking access if a surcharge is not paid. Netflix has already tried it in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru over the past year, introducing an additional three to four dollars for each “second home”.