[fbernier]

I can't think of a way they can enforce almost anything without annoying a bunch of people with false positives.

If someone has a secondary home like a chalet they go to from time to time, they'd have to pay for a second account?

[tptacek]

No, because they do explicit vacation passes. If you literally maintain two households --- or, like my family, have a kid in a college apartment --- you're probably going to have to spring for a second account. Which, fair enough: the college apartment also requires us to spring for a second ISP bill, second utilities, second toaster; it was nice to get away with not duplicating the Netflix bill, but not reasonable to feel entitled to it.

[earthling8118]

No, it is not "fair enough". Those aren't the same situations. You need to pay a second ISP bill because that requires physical infrastructure to be laid down and maintained. Same with utilities and the toaster. Once you have the network connection you can access Netflix just fine. Unless they place an arbitrary restriction on it.

[taeric]

Me thinks you haven't given much (any?) consideration to how much physical infrastructure Netflix has sprinkled around so that streaming works well.

[earthling8118]

Then they shouldn't sell multi-screen plans. I don't particularly care about how much they spend on infrastructure-- that's not my problem. If I'm a customer I expect to be able to use what I pay for

[andsoitis]

By that logic, everyone on earth can share a single account!

Perhaps you didn’t know, but Netflix operates one of the biggest CDNs on the planet: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

[dns_snek]

> By that logic, everyone on earth can share a single account!

I suppose we can take turns watching content on their 3 screen(!) plan. My ticket #1,204,394,701 should come up in around 30,000 years.

[crayboff]

If I pay for 7.88 billion concurrent streams, yeah I would expect to be able to have everyone access it

[earthling8118]

What a stretch of logic on your part. They don't offer a plan for several billion people

[taeric]

Probably will impact folks that travel and want to watch while away from home. Specifically, those where their family did not travel with them.

That said, probably easy enough to deal with that, as I'm guessing most of them take a common device with them? Not sure.

But, yeah, your example is pretty much how I view this. Was nice for a few cases where it was working. But hardly earth shattering.

[tptacek]

I don't know anything about Netflix's system, but similar-seeming anti-fraud systems just fingerprint devices. Chances are, if you normally watch from your laptop or iPad and travel a lot, you're not going to notice any changes.

[taeric]

Exactly. Is what I tried to allude to with "common device."

That said, with how many folks leave their contacts in rental cars, I wouldn't be too shocked to know folks try to login at other locations. I imagine that would be a popular integration with hotel booking systems. Basically, make it so your netflix is attached to the hotel tv when you get there.

My gut is that hotels also don't want that?

[hirundo]

Presumably they know when they are streaming for a given account. They could simply say an account can be used for a single stream, and decline to start a second concurrent stream for the same account. Include download playbacks as a form of stream. The headache of coordinating watch times when sharing accounts would incentivise additional subscriptions.

[taeric]

That is precisely what they shouldn't do. I have several televisions and devices in my one house.

Granted... We don't actually watch too much television, such that it may not actually impact us if they do it this way. Still, I imagine many families with children would be heavily impacted by this strategy.

[joe463369]

Yes! You have a second home and it's a chalet. You can afford two Netflix subs.