Sounds like Netflix needs a "Falsehoods programmers believe about families" list.
Trying to shove societal concepts into SQL tables never ends well.
a german public tv license is per household too and would not include the hospital patient either. and of course, they get plenty of complaints about edgecases as well.
if netflix wanted to sell to families, they could do that by somehow letting you specify who the familymember is, and how they relate to you and limiting it to a number of people.
These are not decisions by programers. These are business decisions.
They are trying to find a way to part as many people with as much money as possible but not more. If they err in one direction they leave money on the table, if they err in the other direction they start losing subscribers.
Else they should just be ignoring password sharing as a concern altogether rather than causing negative press.
It’s always an interesting moment when a company stalls out on organic growth and decides its strategy should be to start to blackmail existing customers and try to grow revenue that way. This is how you get to a situation where enterprise IT leaders live in fear of being audited by Oracle and actively seek to replace what was once a key part of their IT strategy just because the vendor is so aggressive about leaping on any license infringement however unintentional.
[1] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/netflix-sharing-passwo...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/250934/quarterly-number-...
[3] https://www.nme.com/news/tv/netflix-ridiculed-over-resurface...
* Are 'edge cases' < 1% or are they ~ 20% (say) of usage.
* Is there a significant downside to ignoring the tricky stuff.
etc.