You can share your account, with other people at your same physical location. You can't share your account with people who are going to be primarily watching Netflix from a different physical location than your own.

Does not seem unfair, IMO.

I am in a LDR and hence have a shared account. I also do spend significant amount of time away from my primary location. This is just going to be annoying.

If you're in a long distance relationship, you're in two different households, and need two different accounts. Before there was Netflix, there was cable TV; did you expect to share that with your significant other? What other services do you share cross-country that way?

Why do people compare Netflix with cable? It's a completely different technology. There are more differences in the technology that similarities. It's similar to asking someone who's using a mobile phone to buy a 2nd mobile phone for work because "You don't expect to be able to use your land line phone at work as well, do you?"

Because cable and Netflix literally do the exact same thing and serve the same roles in the market, and just because it happens to be the case that it's trivial to give your Netflix account to everybody, and not just to your next-door neighbors like in the sitcoms, that doesn't make it commercially reasonable to do so.

> What other services do you share cross-country that way?

Email, phone, password manager, ... any other internet based service.

Netflix is not like cable. Cable is provided by a physical wire connected to one location. Netflix is delivered over any internet connection. If I pay to have multi-device access, it should not matter where those devices are located.

What about your internet connection. Can you share you 5G in two different locations at same time?

My mother-in-law is a self-proclaimed useless person at anything technical. You don't know how many hours it took for us to explain her phone to her. I gave her a Netflix profile and signed her in to my account. It makes life so much easier. I'd happily pay more for the ability to share my account with her. At this rate we'll have to administer two accounts from our house, rather than let her use mine. Why are they just making this harder, rather than just asking us to pay more to continue doing what we're doing?

This doesn't affect me currently, but I used to (privately) watch Netflix at work all the time. This policy would (IMO unreasonably) prevent me from doing that. They could probably get most of the effect they want by limiting this policy to TVs and leaving portable devices + computers be.

It actually wouldn't prevent that. They cover that basic scenario and the requirement is that you watch at least one thing from your home IP account at least once every 31 days on whatever device you are going to be using from a remote location. Worst case scenario, you open the Netflix app on your phone and let it "watch" something while you're sleeping, or on a Zoom call on your laptop, etc.

So you're saying if I have a non-share enabled tier, I can't invite people over to netflix and chill?

If that's not what you're saying, then if I don't need sharing for use in the home, then what purpose does the share tier serve if I can't share it?

My bet would be that the satisfying condition is disjunctive: either you're watching from an IP range that Netflix trusts, or you're watching from a device that Netflix trusts because it was fingerprinted and used regularly from that IP range.

What you can't do is give your password to someone outside your household and have them watch Netflix from their house whenever they want. Which, I mean, obviously that was never really OK.

> So you're saying if I have a non-share enabled tier, I can't invite people over to netflix and chill?

Curious, how did you extract that from the above? Inviting people over to watch with you isn’t sharing your account, nor is it watching from outside your household.

Sometimes different people in the same household want to watch different things at the same time.

And they still can.

the intent is to let you watch a movie in your room while your partner/kids/parents/roommate looks at another in a different one.

Please explain, in detail, how you think this is fair for those of us who are single.

From https://www.netflix.com/ChangePlan

Only people who live with you may use your account. Watch on 4 different devices at the same time with Premium, 2 with Standard and 1 with Basic.

There isn't a tier for sharing it outside your household. There are different screen tiers, so one person can be watching upstairs, one can be watching downstairs, and one can be watching on the bus, etc. But they're all supposed to live together.

What's very annoying is that that those are also the max resolution tiers. It is the 1 screen max 720p tier, the 2 screen 1080p max tier, and the 4 screen 4K UHD tier.

The resolution I want and the number of screens I want are almost completely independent, so it is annoying to me that they don't have plans that decouple them.