Netflix to start testing warnings for people borrowing login info
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Me, Mom, Dad, Grandparents, GF, GFs Mom.
Other than myself and my GF, most of the people on this list watch something on Netflix every couple of months, when I or someone/something else recommend them a movie or show.
I don't want them to use my profile, because we then obviously can't watch the same things, and it'll break my recommendations. I get why Netflix wants to split up accounts. Currently, they get approximately $240 per year from me and my family. If everyone has to create their own account, that number goes up to $1200.
But that's how my family lives. Parents are separated, grandparents live in their own house, my gf at home with her mom and I alone.
My dad in turn pays Disney+ for me, Spotify is paid by my GFs mother, grandma cooks me a couple of Lasagnas every year. We just share these services.
Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
In the end, these streaming platforms are probably right that you shouldn't be allowed to share accounts if you don't live under the same roof, but it still kinda pisses me off.
Don't really know what I should think about this to be honest...
Typo of extra zero? Is this US dollars?
The most expensive digital plan is 17.99 USD / month. With discs, few $ more.
USD 240/month is excessive.
But I quickly looked at it, the amounts I mentioned are even too low. Converted to USD, I pay $23 per month. So $276 for one person, or $1380 for my use-case.
Keep in mind that not everyone is from the US :)
Their stock is over $500 a share.
In 2020 Netflix has positive cashflow of $1.9 billion.
What are they pissed about ?
At this point I'm paying 20 USD/m for Netflix, roommate for HBOMax, friend's password (via reciprocal sharing) for Disney+, and our online TV service, which my elderly disabled mother can't go without.
The post-cable/satellite TV revolution has tripled my costs from what it used to be.
But that's just it. A Netflix account isn't valid "for you and anyone you think it is". It's valid only for people in the same household. The thing they are cracking down on is people using the account in a way that they were never supposed to.
Huh. You must have had a really great deal on that nonspecific cable/satellite. Every time I’ve looked at TV packages since before streaming services even existed, it was $50/mo before various fees and at least $70 on the bill, just for basic cable.
On the terms of services.
"4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through the service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household."
I don't agree with it, and I do pay for two simultaneous screens, but that's how it is.
Not that it greatly matters. I don't share my Netflix account with anybody.
What is a "household", and why do you think OP's purchase is related to that concept?
The really fair way to price this is by concurrent viewers, independent of location, and they already have that feature. I too have my in-laws logged into my Disney+ account which they never use. But if they watch my kids, and my kids want to pick up where they left off on the Bluey episode, it's both my profile they need and my responsibility to pay for it.
I subscribed the first month Netflix came to Denmark (my country) and I kept the subscription up for a decade until they started to degrade the stream too much. They fixed that and I eventually came back but stuff like that would turn me of for good.
This seems more like an edge case. If grandma is only watching a couple movies per year, would Netflix even bother throwing up a warning message? If she didn’t have her own profile in your account, it would be difficult for Netflix to even know if this was a shared account or if you were just logging in at her house during an occasional visit.
They’re not rolling this out to go after grandma watching a couple movies per year.
It’s more likely that they’re targeting the heavy users who share a single account. People who would have their own subscription in a heartbeat if they could no longer exploit the shared account loophole.
Else, how do you handle people going on business trips and vacations?
Yes. In every scenario that a company could cut cost, they've done it. If they haven't done it yet, they will do it. Absolutely 100% Netflix is going to cut grandma off.
What's it to Netflix to throw up a message saying "little Timmy, if you're there in the room with grandma then it shouldn't be a problem for you to enter the 6 digit code we just sent to your phone." That's what they're trialing now. Next you're going to have to enter a code even if you don't share your account just in case or due to some error or other excuse when it becomes a PR problem, such as when Netflix bans a customer and cancels their account because boyfriend was trying to watch a movie while girlfriend was at work and didn't see the code on her phone until it was too late, which is also inevitably going to happen, and you're going to read a reddit thread about it that has a score of 35k and 10x gold and Netflix is going to formally apologize for the error and reinstate her account and then it is going to become par for the course after that. That's where this is going, bad UX all round because some middle management can make a bonus by cutting costs, or because Netflix's revenue is falling and they just don't want to admit the cause and refuse to correct the error, like IBM and every other failing company did.
My story: I have amazon prime, but no proper screens that can watch it (linux) and there isn't much on prime that I care to watch anyway. So my parents in another state use the account. Should amazon care? They are still only streaming to one IP but the reality is that we are all pirates.
some linux users are on linux because they want to eliminate proprietary software from their computer altogether. which means no access to un-broken drm media.
Everything and anything it possible on linux. The question is whether I want to bother. I could probably disable my browser's security features and get it working, install some proprietary whatever, but it isn't worth than hassle imho. I've got better stuff to watch than netflix/amazon junk. Whenever I have a hour to kill my first choice tends to be the BBC.
PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Ultimately the best delivery model for the customer would be $0 for unlimited free streaming of movies and music, of course that would tank the industry and stop new production so a balance must be found in terms of what customers will tolerate vs what is needed to fund new content production.
Which is insanely expensive. $5 buys a month of Apple TV+, almost 2 weeks of Netflix, or 2 hours of PPV.
> Should my grandma pay $240 per year, to watch two movies I recommend to her (and are ONLY watchable on Netflix)?
So that's $10. Or sign up for just a month and then cancel. I know people who have Netflix for a few months, and then another service for a few months and so on.
I still remember having to rent movies/TV or buying on DVD as my main way of watching... at 4-6 movies a month and ~$20-30 per season of TV, you'd have to have quite a few streaming services to match that. It's all about convenience vs cost.
> Pay-per-view is probably more appropriate for those who only want to watch a couple movies every month, put ppv isn't available.
and
> PPV is available for most movies, you can rent them from iTunes or amazon for $3-5 for a single watch in my experience.
Yes, PPV is available, but it costs the same to watch a couple movies every month as to subscribe to a whole streaming service. That makes it effectively unavailable (at a reasonable price) for many consumers.
Why isn't a la carte video available at a reasonable markup (say, 200% the cost of 2 hours of a streaming service given the average monthly viewing time)?
So, expecting prices to scale that way for limited-quantity purchases is unreasonable.
The same can be observed in some other industries: museum membership, ski pass.
All subscription services must account for some form of average use. High usage customers are offset by low usage. Thus, it is likely with so many people on your account that others are subsidizing your account's usage.
Nevertheless, I don't think Netflix cares about your low usage family members, like your grandmother. They care about your high usage family and want to get them in their own account.
Netflix already has subscription tiers that varies the number of screens that can simultaneously watch or device downloads. Perhaps Netflix could help honest people be honest by creating tiers with modest increases for different households. Maybe $5 for each additional household?
I am sure they have discussed and don't yet have a great way of enforcing such. One option could be true "sub-accounts" where the sub-account pays for the bump of $5 with a credit card that must be tied to a different address?
Ultimately, piracy is the only remaining option. Because the company has decided it's going to brand you a pirate anyway.
It costs maybe 11$/mo to hire a seedbox running plex that can store whatever media you would want to watch. While it's not next-day or same-day in most cases, in my experience it covers basically everything you would want to watch, along with collaborative watching, which is a perk netflix does not have.
Of course I don't "consume content" (I hate that term, what's with PR and marketing people reducing everything to a business case?) so much anymore, so I'm not quite the pirate I once was. In all honesty, if I'm going to sit in front of a screen, I'd rather talk to people like you on the internet than watch the super strong american hero defeat the bad guy for the gazillionth time, except this time they are sure to remind me that I'm a bad bad man for some belief I have.
However with all the streaming services it's not just as high if not higher if you want everything. Not to mention the crazy Disney fee ($30+ / movie in addition to the monthly subscription). It's great as a DIS shareholder, but pretty terrible for their fans.
Meanwhile in piracy land, you sign up to a seedbox, press a button to set up Plex+Sonarr/Radarr, then you're done. Type in the names of the things you want, share it with as many people as you want, etc. Literally all you have to bother with is disk usage and most of the sites I looked at last month had a minimum offering of 500GiB, some boasting 1TB of disk space -- so even that isn't much of a problem.
Streaming services (Netflix ($9) + Disney ($7ish) + Amazon ($13)): $27
A Randomly-chosen Popular Seedbox: $17.89/mo
That includes Plex + etc + 4TB Disk. One-button setup for all the supported services.
So like I said, all this measure does is drive people to piracy. They're literally faceplanting on their way to extract more and more money from people.
The problem was UX friction. You had to go to a video store, rent a movie, get ready to be raped with fees, or go to a library and hope they have it, or go to a second hand store and browse the selection. You had to have a special piece of hardware or ten, and if a movie you wanted to watch was on a format you didn't have, too bad. That's why people used to watch the same movies every so often. Watch a movie? Doesn't matter if we had seen it already. Let's watch it again anyway. This is how movies like The Big Lebowsky and Friday got their followings, people watching them repeatedly. Like music. This touches on the social impacts of the paid subscription model that is off topic so I won't delve into that.
And then Netflix changed everything. And then everyone else got in on the game, and now you've got worse UX friction than before. You've got to determine which service has the movie you want to watch. You've got to pay for that service, now it looks like per person, for just that movie. And if you want to watch 4 or 5 movies? You might have to have as many as 4 or 5 monthly subscriptions. Or you can rent it for 1.99. But buy it? No, you cannot buy it. I mean, you can, but who has a DVD player and space for a bunch of DVDs?
But tpb has all the movies. And you can own them. And they're all in one place. And as a bonus, they're free if you don't include your VPN service.
Side note, how is tpb different from a library exactly? Besides scale and efficiency, in principle, what's the difference between tpb and a library?
Piracy is just as important. The reason why more don't is because it is easier to just pay and perhaps the content is not worth the effort anymore. People watch movies on fast forward now, play games on phones while watching and generally tv or movie viewing as a background activity.
How many individual users are allowed on an account and whether they need to have any particular relationship (residential or otherwise) are completely arbitrary decisions.
A movie ticket costs more than netflix. And i'm not a fan if subscriptions.
I'm sure the bean counters have done the math and they'll come out ahead, but losing content + raising prices and now killing off people sharing accounts is just a bad look. This is yet another category of business where I think they'd be far better off being private, so in theory there isn't constant pressure to continue increasing revenue. Once you have market penetration, the only way you're increasing revenue is through customer hostile actions (like increasing the price of the service while decreasing the cost to provide it).
Netflix has borrowed billions (and billions) of dollars to get where they are. As a private entity they've gone bust seven or eight years ago.
Netflix priced themselves artificially low to grow, based on debt. That set unrealistic consumer expectations and they might have to face the consequences of that eventually, but Netflix's terms literally always said that accounts could only be shared with people living in the same household as you.
Netflix has been profitable since at least 2005... they may not have grown as quickly, but I'd need some data to back up the claim they'd be bankrupt without billions in investment.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/gross...
>but Netflix's terms literally always said that accounts could only be shared with people living in the same household as you.
I never said anything to the contrary. But it's no secret to netflix or anyone else that account sharing happens. This wouldn't be a news story otherwise. It also doesn't change the fact it's customer hostile and clearly an attempt to increase revenue.
Only because you're allowed to not count issuing junk bonds towards your profitability. Netflix only started having cash positive quarters this year, and has fifteen billion dollars in debt, generally going up by four billion dollars a year.
Netflix literally could not have afforded the interest on those junk bonds as a private company. It was only able to borrow so cheaply on the promise of it's growth.
(And this year is unusually friendly to them due to Covid, I do not think they are suddenly actually profitable, they just didn't spend nearly as much as normal.)
[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-will-probably-spend-19-bi...
You can't acquire a private company unless they're willing to sell.
>Switching to their own content required and still requires huge amounts of money; est. 17bn last year[0].
I don't follow your point? Private companies can take a loan just as easily as public. If they were unable to attain the financing they wanted, they'd still have plenty of their own content, just not as much.
>Additionally, the gross profit number is a flawed number for many reasons; try looking at operating or net income or anything farther down the income statement from basic revenue. Netflix has no option but to finance content spend with debt as they do not generate enough FCF to cover content spend and will quickly fall behind competitors if they don't.
I'd suggest you do the same. Their cash balance increased from $5 billion to $8 billion last year. They took out "debt" to finance their movies because money is cheap right now. Nothing they've done required them being a public company, and nothing you've shown makes me believe they couldn't be in exactly the same position they currently are as a private company. They didn't even start borrowing money of significance until 2012, I still don't believe for a second they'd be "bankrupt" as a a private company.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/nflx/financials/balance-she...
Private companies face a higher cost of capital than equivalent public companies and are unable to borrow as much money as public companies are able to. This is basic finance 101 stuff. Without debt financing, they would not have been able to begin their pivot when they needed to. Netflix is able to borrow at much lower rates than a company with the same financials solely because they are a large public company. Google "equity cushion" if you're unfamiliar with the term.
> I'd suggest you do the same. Their cash balance increased from $5 billion to $8 billion last year. They took out "debt" to finance their movies because money is cheap right now. Nothing they've done required them being a public company, and nothing you've shown makes me believe they couldn't be in exactly the same position they currently are as a private company.
Yes, Netflix is doing much better financially over the past few years and especially in the past year given the pandemic. I don't see how their cash balance is relevant in the face of content spend 2-3x that much. The initial contention was over content spend and a misleading gross profit number.
>They didn't even start borrowing money of significance until 2012, I still don't believe for a second they'd be "bankrupt" as a a private company.
They started borrowing when they needed to pivot to their own content, had to do so at pretty high rates, and luckily succeeded in their pivot.
Throughout this, I don't see any acknowledgement of where streaming was back then and how competitive the space has become since then. Netflix needs to spend on content or it will get left behind. A smaller Netflix offers no competitive edge right now and a smaller Netflix years ago would have been held hostage by content owners while being unable to have any real control over sub pricing; see poorly handled rate increases years ago.
Why is that? (Sorry, I never took finance 101.) Is it because public companies can more easily put up corporate ownership as collateral for the loan? Or because of the extra scrutiny they get from the SEC?
It's because junk debt bonds are much cheaper interest rate wise for rapidly growing public companies as the growth means they are less risky.
I guess I took a different finance 101 than you did - it was at an accredited university though, so I'm fairly certain they weren't making things up as we went. I've literally never heard of a public company being able to borrow more because they were public. Quite the opposite actually, as a private company with a solid financial track record isn't subject to the whims of shareholders and short-term quarterly-returns based internal investment.
Now if you're pets.com that is burning through cash like it's water in the hopes of making money 20 years down the road... that's a different story. That's also not Netflix.
Again, the t&cs explicitly forbid you account sharing with anyone outside your household.
(As does Spotify's, and Spotify started doing something similar to do this a few years ago.)
Seems easily distinguished from the case of independent adults who sleep in different homes every night and have separate addresses on all their tax forms, drivers’ license and voting registrations...
They're just forcing 2FA on accounts that meet some kind of threshold of "suspicious" behaviour. There's likely a lot of metrics being used to identify that.
Facebook does prompt people to upload Photo IDs sometimes but I doubt Netflix wants to get that invasive.
(I had interpreted the question as related to how to interpret the T&C. Agree that ultimately, it’s impossible to enforce the existing T&Cs to the exact letter, although some combination of annoyances and mild shamings might affect user behavior and presumably this is what they are testing.)
Let's apply some common sense, right. If you're a trucker sharing your account with your spouse at home is probably fine. Sharing your account with two dozen trucker buddies and fifteen cousins probably isn't.
Peanuts cost argument doesn't hold any water.
find a better hobby than watching shows on 10 streaming services
can't complain that a company is trying to make money offering a product...
there's no free lunch
If you live in a household then it’s easy to run into the situation I explained. I don’t use 5+ streaming services, but the household does because people have different preferences.
They won't get extra work because they don't want to, they want to spend 10+ hours having cheap/free fun
I know this because I am one of those people, ha!
netflix has to pay its employees and turn a profit, it can't offer services for free
Personally, I have to agree with you that they have a long way to go before I'm going to be as annoyed with them as I am with many of my other service providers (cell, cable, ISP)
The article clearly mentions that credentials sharing is currently used as a mitigation to the balkanization of streaming services, allowing the cost of all major subscriptions to be spread across several people, essentially bringing down the per-person cost to a reasonable, single subscription's cost.
Cracking down on this doesn't mean people will start paying, they will just go back to illicit means of watching the content.
I agree with another commenter. This seems targeted at people who are borrowing someone's account without their knowledge or consent.
Or, you could just visit Netflix.com, where they explain the reasons behind profiles. “Profiles allow different members of your household to have their own personalized Netflix experience. You can have up to 5 profiles on a single Netflix account.” https://help.netflix.com/en/node/10421
Sharing accounts outside of a household is stealing. I fail to see a big difference between that and any other form of illegal downloads where one person pays and someone else copies. I got some downvotes but nobody bothered to answer the question: how is using someone’s account who doesn’t live with you different in practice from torrenting, from a legal perspective?
How does the answer to this question help inform my question?
There's no difference in principle between homosexuality in the UK in the 60s and now. But it was illegal then, not now. Something being legal or illegal is not a fundamental difference. Something being fundamentally different can be a reason something should be legal or illegal, but something being illegal cannot be used as a justification that it should be.
As far as copying, looking at the fundamental principle that libraries operate on, that information should be made available to as many people as possible as best we can regardless of their socioeconomic status, the only difference I can find is that torrenting and copying are more efficient than libraries in achieving the stated goal. When libraries do it inefficiently it is regarded as a virtue, when we do it ourselves more efficiently without institutional support we are regarded as thieves. But fundamentally, are they not the exact same thing?
My question addresses yours because the answer, if it is "they're not fundamentally different in principle" which is my position, negates yours entirely, and if you can show me how they're fundamentally different in principle, negates that very powerful and apt criticism of your position. The answer basically determines if you're right or I'm right.
Your argument about efficiency is reductionism, it’s completely ignoring copyright and law. I didn’t make the law nor am I defending copyright or the law, but those are absolutely relevant, you can’t pretend they are “moralistic” details and ignore them. At least not if you want your argument to be taken seriously.
> But fundamentally, are they not the exact same thing?
Correct, they are not the exact same thing, not fundamentally, not in principle, and not in practice. Libraries operate on the principle of paying for copies of media in order to loan them out 1 at a time. They do not operate on the principle of making their own copies of media nor on distributing as many copies as possible.
Your answer, in my view, is irrelevant to my unanswered question.
Stealing/theft requires the misappropriation of goods/services that can not be replaced. I.e. once they are gone you do not have them. A real world example of this is stealing a DVD.
Copyright infringement is the unauthorized copying of something. The original good is still around, but someone has made a copy. A real world example of this is copying a dvd that you borrowed from a friend.
Torrenting is copyright infringement as you never had a right to the content (unless you owned the original DVD).
Streaming in my opinion different, you have been given access to a paid stream that is password and drm protected. Netflix is still getting paid. They give you n streams for $/month.
Netflix's TOS says that is against their rules, but they also don't implicitly ban it...
Edit: p.s. I am not a lawyer
> Netflix is still getting paid.
Torrents are also commonly paid for by the first viewer, the person who ripped the DVD, so borrowing someone’s account is no different in that respect. Netflix is subtly different in that you still need an account, and because of that, a single account might not be shared as widely as a single torrent. The monetary discrepancy between a single torrent and a million shared accounts might be equal or even larger for Netflix, who knows. I wouldn’t be very surprised if Netflix believes they’re seeing larger losses than pirated movies, precisely because borrowing accounts is so widely believed to not be illegal, and because people feel like it’s no different from using profiles, so cross-household account sharing occurs more often.
> they don’t implicitly ban it
They don’t have to if it’s against the law already.
That those are geographically distributed should really not factor into anything in 2021.
What makes you think being geographically distributed shouldn’t matter?
It's a nice soundbite, but even he doesn't believe it.
Gaben's quote on piracy was about 2 1/2 years after the big Spore DRM debacle [0], which affected legitimate customers. I've been using Steam for who knows how long and have never had the DRM be an issue, even after several computer upgrades and motherboard replacements. I just have to log in and I can redownload all my games with no issue at all.
Yes, Steam is DRM, but it's sane DRM.
> has a variety of mechanisms to prevent account sharing yeah?
Well...yeah. You aren't supposed to share accounts.
> It's a nice soundbite, but even he doesn't believe it.
It's not just about DRM. When he talks about it being a "service problem", it's not just about the ability to simply play games. When you buy from Steam, you get automatic updates, cloud saves, community integration (such as the Workshop for installing mods and other user-made content), built-in screenshot management features, and more. If you pirate the game, you get none of that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)#DRM_co...
This is why we can't have nice things. Because people feel entitled to others people's work.
Pirates pirate because of bad UX, which Netflix solved for them and others copied, which the entire industry now seems hell bent on breaking again. And they think their size and the DMCA and the learning curve to pirating nowadays can prevent it from happening, so sure, let's abuse our customers now that we think they can do nothing about it. But this will fail. If it is easier to learn how to use torrents and mega and whatever else than it is to navigate the plethora of services to find what you want (at the current rate we will need TV Guide again soon) and call your girlfriend at work to get the 2fa code they just sent to her phone, people will do it.
My hunch is this is only going to cull the second layer and beyond of password sharing (people you wouldn’t feel comfortable texting and asking for the verification code).
They did the increase subscriber price a few months ago. I think they were shocked by the number of people who cancelled. They can't go in that direction. Funds for content have been spent unwisely. 20-25 million dollar comedy show payouts, cancelling popular shows and under replacing expiring content.
Personally I know of very few people that don't share Netflix with others.
It doesn't make financial sense to allow everyone to shoplift your product, especially for something that costs less than an average meal.
Authorized Devices with a limit is a better choice
Well good luck figuring out what that limit should be.
I know households where everyone owns a smartphone and shares a single TV, and other households where every kid has their own TV, Playstation etc.
Maybe max 3 devices per person?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bellexpressvu-must-pay- quebecor-137m-for-not-stopping-signal-piracy-1.2987341
Which brings my question : Would a provider who tolerates account sharing be at risk of being sued by competitors over similar?
It wasn't super reliable either. They used to change / fix things and people with the pirate boxes would end up waiting days or even weeks for the new hack. I can't remember the name of the content protection systems, but IIRC it was an issue / limitation with the actual satellite(s), so it's not like they could flip a switch and fix it. They made huge improvements with the next set of satellites that were put into service.
There was a very brief golden age of satellite piracy when all the FTA stuff was popular, but it didn't last any longer than you'd expect when you consider the logistics of having to deal with a satellite that's in space as one side of the system.
That's crazy.
But then again, this and every other technical “solution” to this problem presented here (piracy, etc) is far beyond what a normal user could be bothered to implement.
I get it. Business team needs to see an upward trend in account sign ups and they’re seeing a plateau. This move will get the normal users legitimized and it will delay a bigger increase in cost for a year or two.
But I think it will have the opposite effect. I have a friend who shared his account with me sometime back and out of courtesy I got Hulu and shared it with him.
I watch Netflix maybe an hour a month, and I can’t even remember the last time I watched Hulu.
If they put an end to sharing, it is very unlikely that I will get my own account. And will stop paying for Hulu too.
But on the other hand, I doubt if they care much about such low usage accounts.
If people can afford their own account without sharing, they will do it. If they are sharing an account, it means they are sacrificing some functionality to save money.
It took them several months to realize there was a simultaneous streaming limitation because it was so rare for 3 of them to try to watch at the same time.
When they hit it, the third person just watches on their shared Hulu or shared HBO account anyway.
Netflix really doesn’t have much for me anymore... not really sure I’m going to use their service.
I mean, not everyone will know how to do it but the commonly mentioned "Family IT guy" likely will.
A lot of money to be made betting against it.
Sure, it's 3 times more than what you pay today. But you are 3 times as many people as I am, so why shouldn't you?
The difference is that if I brought another person into my home then yes, we could split the rent, but it would also halve the amount of living space per person.
Each tier has a number of simultaneous streams allowed. If you want multiple people to be able to stream at once you pay more, and if you are streaming one at a time on the same device, you really think each person should have their own account?
No, and I do not expect my friends to turn away when they are visiting my home. This is not at all what I said or meant, and I think you know that.
> Each tier has a number of simultaneous streams allowed. If you want multiple people to be able to stream at once you pay more, and if you are streaming one at a time on the same device, you really think each person should have their own account?
There are really two things here. Yes, I am aware Netflix has a model where you can pay to have multiple streams ongoing at the same time. That's the model I am questioning, because obviously one person can only watch one stream, so this can only be used by different people in a household.
As for the other part of your question, yes, that is exactly what I think. Each person should pay equally for their own account. Why am I allowed to share my 2 streams with a partner in the next room, but not with a partner in Australia? What is the difference between the two?
One, they know it is unlikely a family would pay for more than one account while living in the same house, but they might get a few extra bucks for the family upgrading to a multiple streams subscription.
Two, they probably have data that a shared account in the same house does less simultaneous streaming on average than a shared account in multiple houses.
I rarely watch Netflix since it seems mostly series stretched across multiple episodes despite having a story that wouldn't justify a comic strip.
So, yes, I am subsidising him consuming stuff that Netflix would have to pay me to watch.
If it really bothers you, get a few people to pay you a few bucks to be included in your "household" and use your netflix account with you the same way that apartment owner sublets the extra rooms.
But I can't do that - this is exactly what the article is saying Netflix is now starting to take action against, and it is already against their TOS.