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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand their logic.

First: you can subscribe to n simultaneous streams/downloads. Ours is 2, and sometimes the kids complain, and end up sorting it out somehow.*

Second: if you have a kid at college, they "live at home" for various other mechanisms (count as a dependent for taxation; qualify for parents' health insurance, can vote in their home district regardless of where they live; can be part of a family phone plan, family apple plan, etc etc...)

* And third: they don't seem to argue about netflix much any more; I think if I dropped the sub to a single session everybody would still be fine. Netflix seems to have an increasing density of junk content, losing its distinguished position.

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Same here. We've had whatever plan allowed 4 people watching at once. Now two kids are in college. I'll hear from them immediately if they get booted from the app. And I'll do exactly what I assume Netflix wants me to do... which is downgrade to the cheapest plan and tell my kids to study more and watch less TV.

The logic seems pretty clear to me, both in terms of financial necessity (keeping Netflix in business) and in terms of policy for households.

And Netflix is a private company, so however dependents or health insurance or voting or phone plans are defined is irrelevant. Also, all of those definitions are different from each other anyways, so it's not like there's any consistency in the first place.

This isn’t about keeping Netflix in business, they are doing just fine. This is about squeezing out every last drop of exponential growth expected by shareholders.

Their stock plummeted 75% between Oct 2021 and June 2022. That's not "doing just fine" by any standard.

So no, this isn't about squeezing out every last drop, this is about making necessary structural changes to remain viable in the long-term.

It was also up 300% between 2019 and 2021, and has bounced way back up since June 2022. This is just reversion to the mean

Wait, when did stock price have anything to do with company health?

Same. Two (maybe even three, I can't remember) streams and used to experience lots of arguing about who is watching what and who can't access, but I haven't heard those fights in quite some time. Particularly annoying when one of the kids would leave a device playing and autoplay just rattles on for a few hours. I'm actually pondering right now whether there's a trivial "wife approval factor" friendly dashboard to theow together to monitor and record router flow to display simple monthly household consumption patterns. Heck go a step further plug in monthly fees into the dashboard and see which services are a waste of spacetime. It could become one of those lmlicense manager BOFH.

It's particularly annoying because I personally find myself watching PlutoTV most lately (so much easier to just turn on something themed channels like Star Trek/MSTK3K/Stargate or Action/Comedy Movies and just watch what's streaming rather than browse around). And it's even more annoying to see that PlutoTV is playing many of the same movies you're paying for on other services.

Yeah good luck to them discerning the very fuzzy boundary of people who live with you, while also allowing all of them to watch when they are not at that house.

People who regularly live between two households will be a common source of customer service tickets.

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