Netflix crackdown on password sharing now includes $2.99 “extra home” fee | Hacker News Reader

Netflix crackdown on password sharing now includes $2.99 “extra home” fee

arstechnica.com

36 pointsBrajeshwar19 comments

> "can watch Netflix on your laptop or mobile device while traveling" and "watch Netflix on a TV outside your home for up to two weeks as long as your account has not been previously used in that location. This is allowed once per location per year."

This seems bonkers. If I visit the same hotel for one day twice in the same year, that counts as a second home?

Ridiculous; why should I pay extra when I am more than once a year in a different house? I am already pay a lot for Netflix and you don’t even offer highest quality with all subscription types like other streaming sites. And the content itself isn’t getting better.

Netflix really starting to get expensive. They suggest now I pay $36 per location on top of the normal fees because I am happen to be multiple weeks a year at family or the house in my home country.

Haha, that's pretty rich. So, if you travel and use it from random hotels, are they going to gotcha tax you too? Or is it only repeat sign-ins from multiple locations by geoip? What about people with multiple homes? It seems iffy to police this and more like trying to keep the prisoners inside an authoritarian regime.

I recently got my own plan of my own accord because I didn't want to see my mom's profile and I didn't want to see hers. (We've had it since the DVD-by-mail days.) Also, I wanted 4K and she's fine with HD.

Another way they could monetize misery is by bleeding suggestions from one profile to the other. Muhah.

These are desperate moves of retreat rather than cool moves of advancement and innovation.

Bastards I would say. When they wanted to grow their user base, they used the argument of password sharing as an incentive for you to subscribe and to take the premium 4 devices at the same time account.

Now that they are a leader on their segment, and not gaining subscribers, they pretend that it was not a feature to increase prices discreetly.

Honestly, if this is the cost of a "shared" subscription, then it's a bargain. The devil is in the details of how they detect that a different IP constitutes a "new home." Especially for those of us who use VPNs or other such security measures.

Every IP is a home. Problem solved!

I am not sure if this is sarcasm or not but in case it is Not:

No it's not a solution, Netflix already heavily uses IPv6 and most sane v6 endpoints will not be NATed. Maybe they could use v6 Subnets as an Identifier but this would be wonky at best.

This would be a support ticket pandemonium since there are more than enough providers with dynamic IP adressing on v4 and v6.

But to be honest I think they might not need all that, more likely is they use some sort of device ID the modern Smart TVs already have Baked in or build some hash of their own with some device specific identifier (size, resolution, manufactuter, User Agent).

The article and information out there seems to imply they're primarily targeting TVs and devices that are used with TVs (SetTopBoxes, AppleTV, Firetv, Roku et al). So it makes no sense to use a device type unspecific Identifier like the IP in any way

My recollection is Netflix is pretty anti-vpn because for instance it gives you the ability to get around region content restrictions.

Example: https://www.howtogeek.com/747840/netflixs-vpn-crackdown-isnt...

I'll miss Netflix about as much as I will miss cable tv.

Baity title. Not in all countries. They are trialing this in five countries starting August 22 - Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

heavy vacation home places.

Torrenting is back on the menu boys+girls..

Only because it's more convenient than this shenanigans.

So if I travel and the hotel TV allows me to sign into Netflix, that's going to count as well?

Do I really need to set up a private VPN to reflect back to my home network or are they expecting that I'll just pay the $3 for the convenience?

If you spend more than two weeks on the same hotel TV you'll need to add it as a home for that month. The policy doesn't apply to a phone or laptop that you bring with you.

If you're doing this it is a multi-thousand dollar trip and a single water bottle in the lobby will cost $3. You do not actually care about $3 though you may object in principle.

This policy targets casual password sharing among the working poor who don't know about VPNs. Whatever you think about that morally it does sound like they nailed the scope.

> If you're doing this it is a multi-thousand dollar trip and a single water bottle in the lobby will cost $3. You do not actually care about $3 though you may object in principle.

The principle is very important. And I think responsible for being able to afford a multi-thousand dollar trip.

Why not pay an extra $3 for that bottle of water? Or pay$3 to use your own toothbrush? $3 isn’t a big amount, but it adds up when everyone starts charging extra money for things they shouldn’t.

I like to think of what a donation of that amount could feed people. $1 is a bulk meal for someone in need. Should Netflix prevent me from donating three meals to needy families?

> I like to think of what a donation of that amount could feed people. $1 is a bulk meal for someone in need. Should Netflix prevent me from donating three meals to needy families?

If they know you have $3 to donate to someone in need they will do whatever they can to prevent you to do it and they will try to capture this amount for themselves.

This is basically how our society works today. And I don't know what is worse, billionaire companies doing this or people that think they are right doing this.

How does this affect users whose location jumps around regularly because they're using a VPN to work around region blocks? I imagine their content providers would love to knock that on the head if they could.

Netflix has gone to considerable lengths to block access to the vast majority of it's content if it detects you're using a VPN for years now, so it probably doesn't have much effect at all.

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