In May this year, the world’s largest subscription video on demand (SVoD) streaming platform Netflix had started to deactivate accounts that had been dormant for over a year with no streaming activity, in order to prevent subscribers from paying for a service they weren’t using. The streaming behemoth has now added an option to ‘pause’ an ongoing membership and ‘resume’ it at will. Earlier the platform only had an option to ‘cancel’ the membership and ‘restart’ it as and when the subscriber wishes to.
To avail of this feature, the subscribers need to head into account settings where they will find the newly added ‘pause’ membership button. On clicking the button they will be taken to the confirmation page where Netflix will inform them that the change will come into effect at the end of the current billing period after which the account will be put on hold for a maximum duration of 10 months. During this period, Netflix will retain their profiles, preferences, watch history, and billing info though no charges will be levied. On confirming, they will be asked for feedback about the reason for choosing to pause the membership. The subscribers can ‘resume’ their membership with a single click from the account settings page and pick up where they left off.
The biggest dampener to this offering though is the fact that it will not pause your membership in the middle of your ongoing month and let you carry forward the remaining days for you to resume on your chosen date. This implies that it is no different in functionality from the cancel membership option which also takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle and allows the subscriber to restart membership within 10 months with the profile and watch history retained.
It seems that Netflix has introduced this option with an agenda that has its roots in human psychology since a subscriber who clicks on ‘Pause’ membership, perceives it as a temporary change and is more likely to come back and ‘Resume’ the membership. In contrast, a subscriber who clicks on ‘Cancel’ membership, perceives it as a permanent change and would be less likely to come back and click on ‘Restart’ membership.
Credits: Based on inputs shared by OnlyTech community forum member Prithi Deb.
