“What about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her?”
Since both parents have an account, the child in question will always be at a location where validated devices exist.
If the child has their own device and returns weekly to where ever their device is homed, their device will always be valid.
There is no issue here and no little girl "coping with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, would have to keep calling up a media company to get their TV access unblocked"
"I suggested that one test case should be a family based in Manila, whose dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor, whose daughter works as a nanny in California, and whose son does construction work in the United Arab Emirates."
I can see an issue with a parent who travels for periods longer than a month such as the "agricultural labor" here, but why would Netflix need to support adult children who live and work full time in other countries? Of course they should have their own accounts.
The whole thing is a bit of a hypothetical thought experiment anyways.
The licensing in those locales is different & the list of acceptable content is different in them as well. Netflix cannot simply give a child access to that content because their parents happen to be in another country. It's a violation of their licensing agreement and also can land them in jail in some circumstances.
They don't - they call it a household and define it as people living in the same place. Doctorow is blurring the reality of the policy to score outrage points.
In a move to appease investors looking for never-ending growth, Netflix dug their grave. Netflix isn’t worth it for most people if they can’t share it. Thinking that peoples college aged son is gonna get their own account, and that dad cares about keeping it once they can’t share anymore is dumb as hell. Talk about out-of-touch.
Because it's not just 1 streaming service anymore it's 2-3 or more depending on what content you like. Most people I know that don't share an account stop their subscription a few months at a time and renew when they want to catch up on content.
It's not hard to imagine streaming companies adopting various enterprise strategies like backpay charges to punish intermittent accounts once the services reach market saturation.
I don't actually see any of this as terribly tragic. We're talking about a recreational service here, nothing of urgent importance.
But...
> Two drinks at a bar can be $20
That entirely depends on where the bar is. I've paid $10 a drink before, but that's an above average price in my area. It also doesn't alter the fact that for millions of people, $20 is a lot of money. They aren't dropping money on expensive drinks at a bar on the regular.
Many people signed up for Netlix when it wasn't about the content. There was a time when movie companies just licensed out everything they weren't actively selling on bluray cheaply so Netflix had most of the movies you wanted, and when the most popular Netflix exclusive content had a lot of Marvel shows that have since been taken to Disney+.
As for Netflix's self-produced content, too many shows dropped inconclusively after two seasons discourages investment in new IP.
So now for a lot of people, Netflix is charging triple what they signed up at, for less than half as much content.
Sure, they were forced into it, a lot of this was the big publishers realising they could take their content and run their own streaming service. But for a lot of people, the appeal of Netflix was "the legal site with all the TV" and that's increasingly in the past.
Netflix uses information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device signed into your account is connected at your primary location.
I have 2 family members counting myself on my account and each of us have a different static public IP address but within the same CIDR block so I guess that is the end of Netflix for me?
Perhaps that is the case these days. Some years ago I knew many people that had 5 static IP's for their family but I have no idea if that is still a thing. I tried to get 5 IP's for each of my fiber connections and the ISP was going to have a board meeting to discuss it so I settled for one. Small ISP I use IP addresses much like DBA's use disk space and memory.
> different static public IP address but within the same CIDR block
I have three dynamic IPs on different CIDR blocks. They'll change if the MAC address of my firewall changes, so I wonder what happens if I swap my firewall.
I wonder how strict the checks will be. I can easily send my siblings a VPN gateway with wireless using the same SSID as I do.
The title here sounds like tech companies are breaking up families or something. Also the use of "big tech" is another lumping all large companies into an issue that is related to Netflix
This is something that affects Netflix (and Hulu) more than it affects Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+.
People don't generally share Amazon accounts with too many people because it means shared viewing and purchase history of content outside the Amazon Prime Video catalog (for example, medicines etc).
Same with Apple. Shared Apple accounts often mean lots of shared content (apps, sometimes camera photos) so people don't do it outside of people they trust.
It's extremely common for governments to have rules, and legal rulings, based on who counts as a family or a household. Businesses are often forced to follow those rules, as they are providing service to a "household", must allow "family" visit ill relatives, and so forth.
The only "techno-hubris" is thinking they can determine this by IP address.
I think the hubris is thinking that this will make them more money instead of just convincing people to leave and pissing off their customers who have already dealt with years of Netflix jacking up their prices, ignoring their feedback, canceling popular shows, the increase in ads, the sharp decline of Netflix's catalog in terms of quality/quantity, etc.
Convince is one of the few things Netflix still has going for it, and they're about make using their service a pain in the ass for a lot of paying customers. Not a smart move.
I'm totally fine with netflix going after abusive sharing. If 30 people are logging in with the same account from IPs all over the country/world by all means cut them off, but people who signed up for family plans and pay for access to netflix over a certain number of screen should get exactly that without being hassled.
I haven't been bitten by this yet personally, but once I have been I'll be reevaluating my subscription and I strongly suspect I'll either be canceling entirely, or at the very least going to a much cheaper plan that better represents what I'm actually getting from Netflix.
Cory Doctorow is uninteresting and exhausting. This screed barely explains what Netflix's policy is, or what actual problems this is causing. The idea that services get worse when they need to find novel ways to grow revenue from existing products is broadly accurate.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 66.0 ms ] threadSince both parents have an account, the child in question will always be at a location where validated devices exist.
If the child has their own device and returns weekly to where ever their device is homed, their device will always be valid.
There is no issue here and no little girl "coping with the dissolution of her parents’ marriage, would have to keep calling up a media company to get their TV access unblocked"
"I suggested that one test case should be a family based in Manila, whose dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor, whose daughter works as a nanny in California, and whose son does construction work in the United Arab Emirates."
I can see an issue with a parent who travels for periods longer than a month such as the "agricultural labor" here, but why would Netflix need to support adult children who live and work full time in other countries? Of course they should have their own accounts.
The licensing in those locales is different & the list of acceptable content is different in them as well. Netflix cannot simply give a child access to that content because their parents happen to be in another country. It's a violation of their licensing agreement and also can land them in jail in some circumstances.
It's also only between $10 and $20 a month. Two drinks at a bar can be $20
But...
> Two drinks at a bar can be $20
That entirely depends on where the bar is. I've paid $10 a drink before, but that's an above average price in my area. It also doesn't alter the fact that for millions of people, $20 is a lot of money. They aren't dropping money on expensive drinks at a bar on the regular.
As for Netflix's self-produced content, too many shows dropped inconclusively after two seasons discourages investment in new IP.
So now for a lot of people, Netflix is charging triple what they signed up at, for less than half as much content.
Sure, they were forced into it, a lot of this was the big publishers realising they could take their content and run their own streaming service. But for a lot of people, the appeal of Netflix was "the legal site with all the TV" and that's increasingly in the past.
Netflix uses information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device signed into your account is connected at your primary location.
I have 2 family members counting myself on my account and each of us have a different static public IP address but within the same CIDR block so I guess that is the end of Netflix for me?
I have three dynamic IPs on different CIDR blocks. They'll change if the MAC address of my firewall changes, so I wonder what happens if I swap my firewall.
I wonder how strict the checks will be. I can easily send my siblings a VPN gateway with wireless using the same SSID as I do.
"This Is What Netflix Thinks Your Family Is"
The title here sounds like tech companies are breaking up families or something. Also the use of "big tech" is another lumping all large companies into an issue that is related to Netflix
People don't generally share Amazon accounts with too many people because it means shared viewing and purchase history of content outside the Amazon Prime Video catalog (for example, medicines etc).
Same with Apple. Shared Apple accounts often mean lots of shared content (apps, sometimes camera photos) so people don't do it outside of people they trust.
The only "techno-hubris" is thinking they can determine this by IP address.
Convince is one of the few things Netflix still has going for it, and they're about make using their service a pain in the ass for a lot of paying customers. Not a smart move.
I'm totally fine with netflix going after abusive sharing. If 30 people are logging in with the same account from IPs all over the country/world by all means cut them off, but people who signed up for family plans and pay for access to netflix over a certain number of screen should get exactly that without being hassled.
I haven't been bitten by this yet personally, but once I have been I'll be reevaluating my subscription and I strongly suspect I'll either be canceling entirely, or at the very least going to a much cheaper plan that better represents what I'm actually getting from Netflix.