Peloton; Netflix; Samantha Lee/Business Insider
- Some people are jailbreaking their Peloton stationary bikes to use the attached tablets for purposes other than what the company intended, like watching Netflix.
- Others are seemingly hacking the exercise bikes to artificially log impressive race times and shoot to the top of the service's leaderboard rankings.
- The practice illustrates how people are finding ways to use products outside the traditional business model of Peloton, which relies on subscription fees for its software.
- Peloton starts trading publicly on the Nasdaq Thursday.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Peloton gives you no choice but to work out.
For the 500,000 paying subscribers of the exercise-bike startup listing its shares on the Nasdaq Thursday, this rigidity is a major draw. Peloton's bikes come with a touchscreen tablet that's meant to show just one type of video: Peloton's rotation of personal trainers shouting words of encouragement.
These workout videos are packaged with preselected music and software that tracks cyclists' speed, and sold for a $39 per month subscription on top of the cost of a stationary bike. This is the only software that Peloton intends its users to access while spinning.
But some users are jailbreaking their Pelotons to get around those parameters.
For some, this means "rooting" the Android-based tablet attached to the Peloton to access apps like Netflix and Spotify instead of Pelotons' own software.
Others are seemingly hacking the exercise bikes to artificially log impressive race times and shoot to the top of the service's leaderboard rankings, much to the annoyance of the broader Peloton community.
The practice of jailbreaking cycles is relatively niche, but it illustrates how people are finding ways to use products outside the traditional business model of Peloton, which relies on subscribers paying to use the services that the cycles' tablets are intended for.
