I figured this was coming at some point. Believe it or not[0], I don't share my password with people beyond my immediate family. My immediate family is likely

I figured this was coming at some point. Believe it or not[0], I don'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's laptop, my daughter's iPad, one of their TVs at Mom's[1], all of their TVs at home and the two TVs at "The Cabin"[2]. Like a lot of us, I'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't providing me a service I can'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/TV much the same way I stopped downloading MP3 files two decades ago -- the streaming services were far less ideal than what is/was available for music, but they were approaching "good enough" and were a lot less work for me. I expected this would come and I'm curious to see how it plays out. I don't even know how I am going to actually 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? Here's where they're currently failing: 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 "they don't re-connect when things go wrong" or "I hit the home button by accident and it takes 10 clicks and 2 minutes to return to the thing I was watching", etc. 3) Every "Season", each of the services gets 80% of the same movies, most of which are trash. The "good" movies are split up among 4-5 services. 4) The "big" 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] I'm paying a "Typical Cable Bill plus some Premium Channels" 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't have it, I can go to a locally hosted web site, put in the name of something and it'll (usually) show up in 5-10 minutes. If it's a TV show, it'll start downloading everything. The cost was an (older) server with a dedicated RAID controller -- about $2,000 which lasted about 5 years (and was mostly used for "things other than streaming movies/music"), a VPN subscription at a few bucks a month and some patience setting everything up. I'd put my money on "if any one of my services flags me, I'll probably cancel all of them and go back to the more convenient days" [0] Honestly, I don't care. [1] My son got logged out and couldn't reach Mom, so he called me for the password; that's probably the most likely to get flagged. [2] Which is used from May-November about 50% of the time. We all have Netflix accounts; it really didn't make any sense to buy a separate one for a home we don't use year round, though we do that for cable television. [3] I've done this back when I wasn't willing to open a port for Plex [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 buy BluRay discs if I could rip them and play them from my media server with all of the audio/video features. While I can do this with various tools, it's far more convenient to just download something someone else ripped and I don'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 zero pirated movies, today. [5] What a missed opportunity ... I wanted to watch Picard -- it's $50 if I want both seasons. That's a few months of service. Had they given me an offer like "Subscribe for 6 months and you get a code to purchase the season on Apple/MS/Amazon/etc for (hopefully) more permanent streaming rights" 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...