Netflix wants to chop down your family tree
I figured this was coming at some point.  Believe it or not[0], I don&#x27;t share my password with people beyond my immediate family.  My immediate family is likely to run smack into one of those edge cases.  I share custody with my children and I share a Lake House with family.  My Netflix account is used for my kids mobile devices, my son&#x27;s laptop, my daughter&#x27;s iPad, one of their TVs at Mom&#x27;s[1], all of their TVs at home and the two TVs at &quot;The Cabin&quot;[2].<p>Like a lot of us, I&#x27;ve thought about this problem and come up with several ways to sort it out.  I have business internet service at home and a DD-WRT router up north.  I have it configured with a virtual access point that is bridged via VPN to my home network and could easily tunnel the TVs that way[3].  The problem is that Netflix isn&#x27;t providing me a service I can&#x27;t get from someone else (or via piracy[4]).  The funny thing about all of that, though, is that I had a major hardware failure (PSU took out ... nearly everything) in a server over a year ago.  I solved it by subscribing to a bunch of services and stopped downloading movies&#x2F;TV much the same way I stopped downloading MP3 files two decades ago -- the streaming services were far less ideal than what is&#x2F;was available for music, but they were approaching &quot;good enough&quot; and were a lot less work for me.<p>I expected this would come and I&#x27;m curious to see how it plays out.  I don&#x27;t even know how <i>I</i> am going to <i>actually</i> react if I get flagged.  I am becoming more and more unhappy with the various streaming options available, today, and I subscribe to -- like -- 9 different services?<p>Here&#x27;s where they&#x27;re currently failing:<p><pre><code>  1) Every service has the same 200-300 videos, produced in Canada, usually True Crime series (sometimes with different titles but the *same episode* -- in one case, a Netflix documentary movie was listed as an Exclusive and it was *identical* to a Discovery+ documentary with a different title).
  2) The UX of every service has various things *very* wrong -- each has its own selection of profanity-inducing circumstances, be it &quot;they don&#x27;t re-connect when things go wrong&quot; or &quot;I hit the home button by accident and it takes 10 clicks and 2 minutes to return to the thing I was watching&quot;, etc.
  3) Every &quot;Season&quot;, each of the services gets 80% of the same movies, most of which are trash. The &quot;good&quot; movies are split up among 4-5 services.
  4) The &quot;big&quot; things I want to watch are all on different networks, some of which have *nothing* else that I want to watch (read: Peacock and Paramount+)[5]
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I&#x27;m paying a &quot;Typical Cable Bill plus some Premium Channels&quot; would cost but do not have cable or a cable-like subscription (Youtube TV, etc).  Contrast that with my media server setup: Everything can be searched in one place.  If I don&#x27;t have it, I can go to a locally hosted web site, put in the name of something and it&#x27;ll (usually) show up in 5-10 minutes.  If it&#x27;s a TV show, it&#x27;ll start downloading <i>everything</i>.  The cost was an (older) server with a dedicated RAID controller -- about $2,000 which lasted about 5 years (and was mostly used for &quot;things other than streaming movies&#x2F;music&quot;), a VPN subscription at a few bucks a month and some patience setting everything up.<p>I&#x27;d put my money on &quot;if any one of my services flags me, I&#x27;ll probably cancel all of them and go back to the more convenient days&quot;<p>[0] Honestly, I don&#x27;t care.<p>[1] My son got logged out and couldn&#x27;t reach Mom, so he called me for the password; that&#x27;s probably the most likely to get flagged.<p>[2] Which is used from May-November about 50% of the time.  We <i>all</i> have Netflix accounts; it really didn&#x27;t make any sense to buy a separate one for a home we don&#x27;t use year round, though we do that for cable television.<p>[3] I&#x27;ve done this back when I wasn&#x27;t willing to open a port for Plex<p>[4] I am financially capable of paying for things I want to watch so I do.  I pirate movies when I cannot get them in the format that I want.  I would <i>buy</i> BluRay discs if I could rip them and play them from my media server with <i>all</i> of the audio&#x2F;video features.  While I <i>can</i> do this with various tools, it&#x27;s far more convenient to just download something someone else ripped and I don&#x27;t feel particularly bad about choosing not to jump through a mess of hoops just to reward the movie studios for their awful technology.  That said, due to a server meltdown, I have exactly <i>zero</i> pirated movies, today.<p>[5] What a missed opportunity ... I wanted to watch Picard -- it&#x27;s $50 if I want both seasons.  That&#x27;s a few months of service.  Had they given me an offer like &quot;Subscribe for 6 months and you get a code to purchase the season on Apple&#x2F;MS&#x2F;Amazon&#x2F;etc for (hopefully) more permanent streaming rights&quot; I would have done it and given the service a chance.  This could have been offered to me when I viewed the Picard series on Amazon Prime...