Originally Posted by
PLOL
I honestly can't see how they could do this without it being a huge pain for legitimate users. I'm just one person and I have netflix on my TV, laptop, ipad, phone, etc. The premium plans are meant to be shared with a family, hence why you can watch on up to 4 screens at once. The only thing they can do is limit the number of screens you can watch at once, but then that devalues the benefits of a premium plan. I think if they do anything, it will be very incremental like limiting it from 4 screens at once to 3 screens. What they do to prevent sharing right now is limit the number of devices you can download content to. But most people don't care about that.
The streaming service that is best equipped to prevent sharing is Amazon Prime Video. Nobody wants to share their Amazon password with somebody unless they really trust that person.
I've actually thought about this problem before. Not that I want to make it easier for Netflix to charge me more money, but I was just thinking from a theoretical standpoint how they could accomplish it. I realize that number of screens can be used to limit it, but as you noted, that's the whole reason people purchase premium.
So how to differentiate between a family of 5 watching different things on Netflix at once in the same house, and a shared account of 6 people in 6 different households?
There are various ways this can be done:
For PC users, mobile devices on Wifi, and Netflix-integrated TVs, they can simply get the IP address. This should comprise almost all of the viewing. Not much viewing is done through cellular data.
It would be relatively easy at this point to determine if people are multiaccounting, rather than just using their devices as they travel. They can ignore places that come up fairly infrequently -- such as the IP of a hotel when you're traveling.
So let's say these are 6 different heavily used lPs on PLOL's account. They can determine that it's most likely 6 different people, especially if all 6 of these addresses resolve to residential IPs (which is easy to determine). At this point, they can send a warning to the customer (or put a pop-up) that they have detected multi-household usage, and that the user must either stop it, upgrade, or get the account suspended.
They could have some kind of internal, unpublished threshhold, to where 3 heavily used residential IPs will be ignored, but anything more than that will trigger the message. Yes, there will be people who find ways around this -- such as those who learn to change their residential IP, or those who use VPNs. However, this will be the extreme minority of users, and Netflix can simply ignore this factor.
No doubt this would bring on some bad press and a ton of social media outrage. Netflix probably doesn't want it at this point, as they're doing well anyway. No point to rock the boat. Take a look at the Moviepass disaster, where among other mistakes, they obsessed over multiaccounting to the point of being draconian, and their methods also had plenty of false positives. That was one of many factors which killed them.
However, if Netflix wanted to do it, they could do it.
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