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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> But taking more aggressive measures poses risks. The people using services for free — especially younger consumers — may never agree to sign up for a subscription, no matter how many hassles they endure. That means companies would mostly just be alienating paying customers, who could get frustrated and stop using an app or cancel their service. In other words, there’s plenty of downside and possibly little upside.

They should offer a lowball “add a user” price because Johnny Millenial might get his parents to tack on a few bucks but he’s not going to sign up for the $150+/mo package.

I’m also surprised they haven’t cracked down on the source IP addresses. It’d be trivial to look at the net bandwidth and see that the usage is at a totally different physical address (and not just a mobile phone).

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>I’m also surprised they haven’t cracked down on the source IP addresses. It’d be trivial to look at the net bandwidth and see that the usage is at a totally different physical address (and not just a mobile phone).

I regularly use these services when I'm traveling. If any of them start restricting me to my home IP (which isn't static anyway) or otherwise start making it harder for me to use their service, I'll be dropping them in a hurry. There's a lot of content out there and not really any that I must have.

I’m referring to massive consistent usage from the same IP. Most residential IP addresses are dynamic but remain fixed for weeks or months at a time. It’d be easy to see that the same IP not associated with the actual customer account has streamed every day for the past month.

Hell I bet they could go a step further and identify the exact person as well! There’s so little competition that it’s likely the account holder and sharer are on the same ISP (ex: you both have Comcast). They would know the name and account on the sharer’s source IP and, more importantly, that it’s not the original account owner.

Yes. I'm sure it's very "easy" and wouldn't end up making mistakes and generating lots of customer support calls and subscription cancelations.

As long as they are careful and work their way down from the most egregious offendors, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

They could also do techniques like gentle shaming "Your account has been used from 46 locations in 7 states today. We might start charging for this level of account-sharing in the future"

If a steaming company has 70 million customers, how many of those customers move house in a given day? How many change ISP's? How many get new devices? How many take trips?

Suddenly your call center budget doubles and cancellations skyrocket.

Well... A family of four with mobile devices and not already at home could see a dozen different IP addresses during a single day. With IP rotation, a few dozen in a month.

Well Netflix does have such plans, which is why this article confuses me. The additional concurrent streams is a huge selling point of the premium plans.

re checking request IP address block: is this what NetFlix does, they don’t work through VPNs, even when I set VPN server to USA location. I always turn off my VPN before trying to watch Netflix.

Netflix seems to work through a VPN for me. I sometimes use it when content is geo-restricted.

Thanks, I will experiment with leaving my VPN on.

It blocks mine, as well.

I use PIA vpn. netflix blocks that for every region/connection pair i've tried. i just leave it turned off and switch to torrent. netflix europe offerings are generally subpar.

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