> Netflix said it won't ban password sharing, but those who do it will have to pay. It will be testing the change in three countries — Chile, Costa Rica and Peru. For 2,380 Chilean pesos, 2.99 U.S. dollars and 7.9 Peruvian sol, respectively, *users can add up to two profiles.*

So apparently, the first adult profile (plus any kids-only profiles, which is still free) is included on the base price, while you can add more profiles (by twos) are charged. So it's more of a family plan in other straming sites.

This is annoying because an actual family who share a single tv may legitimately want separate profiles, in a way that is not password sharing per se. So now if my wife and I want to have our own separate profiles on Netflix they will charge us extra?

That doesn't say that you only get one adult profile on the base price. It says that you can add two additional households, and those get additional profiles. It remains to be seen but I imagine those households will get fully separate usernames and passwords.

It doesn't say that the existing household won't retain the five profiles it used to.

To my reading, it says exactly that. But we will see.

Netflix already allows you to watch on multiple devices simultaneously, and already allows you to watch from places other than your home. (Say, the gym, or airport, I dunno). It doesn't say they are going to stop doing that. So I don't know how they'd knwo which "household" a watcher is in, and the info doesn't say anything about new ways to monitor number of households, it doesn't mention households at all, only profiles. I can't read it in any way but they are reducing the number of profiles you get without paying extra.

But we'll find out!

That is an odd way to do it... people in the same household will still have to pay to have multiple profiles? That seems really crappy, going to make customers really unhappy. But will it lose them any? I don't know, I mean, what choice do you have, most people on netflix want netflix content.

Meanwhile, people can still share with folks in other households as long as they all share the same profile? Weird.

i guess it's hard to enforce otherwise. They already limit to only X simultaneous streams at once, depending on your account tier. But this does seem a way that will surely enrage customers... they probably know what they're doing and know it won't hurt their bottom line regardless?

They haven't explicitly said, but there are multiple established products in the market that use machine learning to detect the patterns of account sharing and throw up roadblocks such as strong 2FA checks that get stronger the more the algorithm has detected risk - https://www.synamedia.com/video-solutions/video-security/cre... or https://www.ibc.org/detecting-illegal-credential-sharing-in-... as examples.

They will likely use one of those.

I'm not so sure about that. Netflix has enough in-house experience in recommendation algorithms that they could pull something together without purchasing a 3rd party solution.

Plus you'll have two problems with Profiles. One, each user could have their own profile and therefore machine learning isn't going to detect abnormal viewing patterns. Two, some people choose to share a single Profile and so it'd be unpredictable whether you could deduce unusual viewing habits from that.

It's likely they will go based off of unique device type and location/IP. If you have a Smart TV streaming from an IP that's 3 states over, it's more likely to be sharing than if it's a phone.

> Plus you'll have two problems with Profiles. One, each user could have their own profile and therefore machine learning isn't going to detect abnormal viewing patterns. Two, some people choose to share a single Profile and so it'd be unpredictable whether you could deduce unusual viewing habits from that.

They'll just do it from account not profile.

And Netflix has external 3rd parties contributing to their recommendation teams and their geofiltering and proxy detection teams...

If you have 4 profiles watching wildly different topics, how would anything stand out enough to flag as another user? I think you've just added to my point.

Great, so my paid services are going to start harassing me when I get sick or go on vacation and my usage patterns change significantly?

I don't share account.

However, I do have multiple internet connections, and frequently switch connections (all with different IPs).

Therefore, I have a feeling it'll eventually determine I'm logging in from multiple households and then ban me, even though it's all just me from different networks.

At which point I'm simply going to unsubscribe.