The reason is they want to bundle stream quality to stream quantity to keep squeezing subscription money for features you don't use. I share my account because 4k streaming is locked behind their Premium tier, 4 simultaneous stream account. I pay double the price in order to get 4k streaming. If they don't want me to share my account, I'd be happy with a 4k quality, 1 stream quantity account, at a lower price. They don't want to do that. When they keep the pricing the same and now try to charge me for account sharing, I'll just cancel.

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/24926

Ah, bundling shenanigans, just like the cable companies. Although I guess Netflix became a cable company the minute they started doing streaming: same business model as HBO, just over the Internet. But now they're no longer special in that regard.

Also why are they even encouraging password sharing? Spotify family plan model makes much more sense, each member of the family plan has their own account with separate login. No more risks of oversharing the password or wondering who changed something.

That is interesting and I wonder how you prevent password sharing.

What comes to mind is using Google / Fb accounts for sign in instead of a separate Netflix sign-in. Whenever it's the former, I won't share with others but the latter I have no issues sharing since it's a single use account.

> That is interesting and I wonder how you prevent password sharing.

I think the Spotify example above is the correct model here: you'll never "prevent" password sharing so long as passwords are easily shared. (Even the idea of trying to use Google or Facebook accounts is just externalizing how easily the passwords are shared to a third party. There's still plenty of shared/group Google and Facebook accounts around.)

But what the Spotify example (among others now too) show is that you can incentivize people to use their own individual accounts by making it easier to accounts to band together in billing cycles as a group (or family) and making that bundling convenient and cheap enough that they prefer it to account sharing. (Plenty of people still share Spotify accounts, but it is certainly far fewer than if they didn't have such a strong family plan option that encourages people to use individual accounts.)

Agreed, my wife and I have shared a single Spotify account since forever: I would just “offline” playlists and then block network access to Spotify. But now that their family plans are well priced and our kid is starting to want to use Spotify we’ll be getting a family plan soon.

They don't want to prevent password sharing - they want to prevent account sharing. The reason they sell you four streams is so that everyone in your household can watch.

Just make the maximum number of profiles and max concurrent streams(screens) one.

Sure people could share a password but they also share watch history, progress in episodes and so on.

> Spotify family plan model makes much more sense, each member of the family plan has their own account with separate login

My wife and I have two kids, a nine year old and a four year old. Under that model, I’d have to sign in four times (per a streaming service) to set up a new TV (or other shared device.) No thanks.

I agree with you that the Spotify (and Apple family plan) approach usually make the most sense—the big difference between the models is the device that they’re utilized on. A phone and a laptop is generally a personal device, whereas a TV is shared.

I get that you can login to Netflix on a laptop or a personal device, but the platform lends itself to lean into a larger medium, like a TV, which may explain why they’ve chosen this model.

I'm actually concerned with Netflix interest in "password sharing".

We have the 4 stream account for myself and my 3 kids. They are all in University and so they dont live at home during most of the school year.

The kids "legal" address is my house, but they login from their school's networks.

Is this "unfair sharing"?

Netflix has the concept of a "Netflix household".

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/124925

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think "legal" address bears any weight here. According to the Netflix definition, they would likely consider your kids to not be part of the same "Netflix household" as you.

If the average shared user has at least two other stream subscriptions, the likelihood of them using Netflix the same time as 3 others is slim.

It’s not uncommon to have 2 kids on an iPad, a daytime show in the living room on, and grandma upstairs watching her shows.