> The OP did address that though, via the fact that you can only have X number of simultaneous streams.

I feel like everyone is forgetting that Netflix is licensing content, not just selling access to streaming bandwidth.

The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households, not the idea that a single login can be used infinitely by as many people as long as an arbitrary simultaneous stream limit is enforced.

> Single household opens up a whole can of worms. If I watch on my iPhone at home: easy, yes. If I watch via my cell connection: OK, maybe let's just whitelist all cell connections. If I watch on my friend's wi-fi: uh oh. Is that legitimate? Is hotel wi-fi OK? How will they know what's hotel wi-fi and what's another person's home? What about an AirBnb?

Several streaming services already have mechanisms to check account sharing. It’s not new. There’s no indication that Netflix plans to go full draconian and limit to a single IP with zero flexibility, despite what people here seem to be assuming. The account sharing detection logic used in other platforms is quite forgiving, and honestly it’s not terribly difficult to detect long-term patterns where two separate locations are constantly using the same account with users never returning “home”.

They introduced this idea that you're paying for a certain amount of concurrent streams, it's not that surprising that people see password sharing as a fair way of getting your money's worth rather than taking advantage.

The initial premise seems slightly manipulative to me I guess, if you paid by the hour or something, no password sharing problem but less profits

>The content licensing is based on the idea of accounts as households

Content licensing is based on whatever imaginary rules you want to make up. The OP is providing a plausible line of reasoning where you can marry this stupidity with something quantifiable (i.e., streams). That sounds quite reasonable. Ultimately, it's their service. They can do whatever they want. As for why the OP is bothering, I can only guess that netflix has built the reputation of being a tech company and the OP thinks that they may show some internal consistency. Otherwise, media companies make up rules all the time (for eg., no sports in your local area).

> If Netflix starts cracking down on things like that it's just going to get really irritating for customers.

They are likely to err on the side of caution. Spotify already does this, on the same restriction, and it is a complete non-issue.

> Single household opens up a whole can of worms.

It really doesn't. Do you live in the same house? Then you're covered. And there's lots you can feed in to a ML model to catch out people who have devices that have literally never appeared together in the same household to spot suspicious activity and, for instance, for 2FA.

If that just stops people reselling accounts to strangers in different countries alone that's a significant win for Netflix.

That's what I found irritating about youtubeTV. the media companies must be really giving youtube a hard time because I found it a pain in the ass to use while traveling and when I was subscribed at an earlier point it wasn't that bad.