Hulu is cracking down on password sharing, just like Disney Plus and Netflix | Hacker News Reader

Hulu is cracking down on password sharing, just like Disney Plus and Netflix

theverge.com

33 pointsmfiguiere15 comments

Please stop calling this “cracking down on password sharing”. That’s spin that frames it as an improper act and enforcement against it, making readers think “I may not like it but I guess it’s what’s right”. The truth is these companies sold access to a certain number of simultaneously active “screens”, and now they’re changing the offering to a single household only. The true version of this headline is “Hulu limits plans to one household, just like Disney Plus and Netflix”. It’s a new limitation, not a crackdown. It’s on location, not password sharing - there are still profiles to select who you are when you log in.

As it always does, stripping spin makes the rest of the story easier to spot: that this has strong parallels with cable, and that this is a gym-like business model of keeping people utilizing only some slim fraction of the capacity they think they’ve bought.

(This isn’t a callout to OP, I know the guidelines require the website’s title. But, tangentially, I strongly disagree with the guidelines on this point: sticking with the website’s title doesn’t reduce editorialization, it just shifts control of it from HN users to propagandists.)

I dunno, I always that one account = one household, and that profiles existed so that different members of the household would have their own set of favorite shows.

But of course, enforcing a single household becomes impossible if one member travels and wants to use their streaming account at a hotel or something.

So really, they should absolutely sell a number of simultaneous streams and not care where those streams come from.

> The truth is these companies sold access to a certain number of simultaneously active “screens”, and now they’re changing the offering to a single household only.

Do you have a citation for that? The terms of service for these services have used “personal” and “household” for years and made it very clear that it was non-commercial, you couldn’t resell access, etc. so your suggested wording seems more like spin than the title.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181206085626/https://secure.hu...

The letter of the rule is so byzantine. I just stayed at a place that had some elses hulu account hooked up still. It asked me incredulously about my IP then I dismissed the message and just used that account since the remote is such a painful ui/ux for relogging in. Per the terms, this poor sap and everyone else who forgot about their hulu account signed into some airbnb is subject to service termination.

> Per the terms, this poor sap and everyone else who forgot about their hulu account signed into some airbnb is subject to service termination.

other services (Youtube, Netflix etc) have a feature where you can log other devices out. hulu doesn't have this?

Hulu has the ability to do this[0]. The problem is (from having encountered this with a Netflix account by someone else) that most people tend to not log out their device remotely when they forget to do it locally in the first place.

[0]: https://help.hulu.com/s/article/manage-devices

What's Byzantine about it?

That person has to log out, or Hulu can log them out remotely, or Hulu can cancel the subscription and stop getting paid (doubtful).

The flag flies higher.

> Unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier, you may not share your subscription outside of your household.

Do they have a service tier that allows this currently? Or is this in preparation for some future changes?

I don't think they do (yet), but having an option that allows it is probably the sensible move... Netflix, who've famously been successful with this crackdown, do.

Have add-on accounts and you extract a little more from people who were doing small-scale sharing with one or two others, and make it less likely that they'll cancel.

I don't even share my Hulu account, but this anti-competitive move was just the last tiny push I needed to cancel Hulu and Disney+ since we barely use it anyway.

Needed to go through 3 pages of "are you sure?", "here's a free month", etc. to cancel but overall took less than a minute. Feels great!

so how do people who live life on the road maintain access to these? touring performers? emergency responders etc?

If media companies were even slightly knowledgeable about their own business instead of being a post-university hangout for CEO nepobabies, they would've offered the equivalent of the network install disk available in some multiplayer games in the nineties, like Starcraft: give to the guest login the chance to watch the same movie is currently watching the account owner as a "trial" and then offer a subscription immediately at the end.

Where can i find more info about those?

Pretty sure a few FPSes had this option too, but can't remember for sure.

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