How to Get Around Netflix’s New Household Policy
May 25th, 2023 was a dark day for many Netflix streamers. The company that famously tweeted Love is sharing a password six years earlier launched a global update to address account password sharing. This has prompted outrage from some as the ability to share passwords across multiple “households” has been removed. The action by Netflix is seen as a response to the first quarterly loss of subscribers in the company’s 25-year history. Many are left wondering how exactly Netflix’s new household management system functions, and if there’s a way to get around it.
Everything in this article is meant to be only educational, not harmful or destructive in any way. The point is to help users understand why they may have lost access to service, understand basic networking, and better respond to how to legally use their account and maximize access to the services.
What is Netflix’s New Household Account Policy?
Before rolling out this new policy, Netflix claimed that over 100 million accounts were being used by streamers who did not pay for the account. This revenue loss, original content that has underperformed, and increased competition from other streaming services have forced the entertainment giant to reflect on how its business is being steered. One of the most straightforward ways to increase revenue is to increase the paying base.
Because of this, Netflix has turned its attention to scaling back users’ abilities to share access to their accounts with their family, friends, exes, coworkers, etc. Netflix is removing “freeloaders” by implementing their new single household policy. Under this new policy, Netflix hopes to:
[give] members greater control over who can access their account.
What does this look like for users? Now account holders will have to specify a primary location where their account will be used:
A Netflix Household is a collection of the devices connected to the internet at the main place you watch Netflix. A Netflix Household can be set using a TV device. All other devices that use your Netflix account on the same internet connection as this TV will automatically be part of your Netflix Household.
The TV device serves as an anchor for identifying the household or network that is allowed access to Netflix shows and movies. Any devices logged into the account not using the same IP address as the primary location will be blocked from accessing content until the account holder explicitly approves their viewing session.
Is Netflix Worried About Backlash from the Household Account Policy?
Restricting or blocking +100 million users on shared accounts sounds like a poor business move. Why would Netflix risk angering so many of their users following multiple negative net user growth quarters in the past year? They are doing this because contrary to Twitter outrage, this is a great business move for two reasons.
First, this move should increase the number of paying accounts, not reduce it. For members already paying for an account, access loss for others on their account is unlikely to drive them to cancel the service. They will continue to enjoy their content. However, those who lost access to free Netflix are met with a choice: find another content source or pay for an account. Which way users will break is not clear and will only be certain when looking at the account growth trends of Q3 and Q4 2023, but a safe assumption is that some of these users will pay.
Second, by making this change, Netflix should reduce its operating costs. Fewer users are not necessarily a bad thing. More users mean higher server costs. The streaming service must meet the demand for videos, which leads to variable user-driven costs.
If a single account has 10 users, they are potentially contributing 10 times the compute costs as an account with 1 user. Those extra 9 users increase Netflix’s operating costs without adding any additional revenue. Netflix is a mature tech company and should worry more about P/L than classic Silicon Valley metrics like user count and service / streamed minutes used. This move should heavily drive down operating costs relative to paying users by reducing server load and cost to service per account.
How Does Netflix Know I’m Not Part of a Household?
Is Netflix Big Brother? Kind of, but not really. They do not do anything out of the ordinary when accessing user data. To understand how Netflix knows that your device is part of a household we will need to approach this from a network engineering point of view.
When Netflix asks for a primary location, they are asking for the ISP IP address associated with your home router. An ISP is an internet service provider (AT&T, Google Fiber, Spectrum, etc.) that provides wired / Wi-Fi internet access and equipment to customers for a recurring charge. The ISP provides you with a router that allows your devices to talk to the Internet:
Every internet-connected device has an IP address which stands for Internet Protocol address. This address allows other devices on the Internet to know where your device is and communicate with it. The router serves as a mailbox to send and receive messages for other devices on your local network.
Before this new policy, it did not matter what IP address your devices requested content from. As long as you were authenticated (logged in as the user) and authorized (had the correct plan / not geolocation blocked) you could access anything you wanted to:
Now Netflix does care which IP addresses are accessing content. These IP addresses are critical to Netflix’s policy as they are the addresses Netflix is checking for when deciding whether to send content or paywall devices. Let’s look at both scenarios with a diagram:
As we can see, it’s not enough to be authenticated now. With the new policy, you need to make requests from a whitelisted IP address and may even need to have your device’s MAC or private IP address whitelisted by your own account (device management is one of the “safety” and control features Netflix stressed in their pressers).
The new policy checks the IP address of devices requesting content to determine whether to fulfill the request, and this IP address is physically bound. It seems there is no way to access Netflix without being physically near the whitelisted router, but this is not true.
Can I Get Around Netflix’s New Household Management?
So you’re curious about how to get around these new account settings? Let’s talk about ways to bypass an IP address. Netflix lays out how to bypass household management in their explanation of the household policy. With the new policy, you designate a household on a TV device to allow Netflix to whitelist the connected router for streaming content.
All the devices connected to this router are allowed to connect to Netflix, but any devices that do not route their requests through the router are blocked. What if instead of using a router that is location specific, we create a new shared server to pass our requests to Netflix? This proxy server would be reachable by any of our devices anywhere in the world, and would not be tethered to a household router. This approach looks like this:
Here we can see many devices with different IP addresses that want to stream Netflix. The anchor device (TV) has an IP address that Netflix knows, but we change the accepted IP to our shared proxy server. While the other devices are not in range of the router and can not access that network, the proxy server is not dependent on geographical location so they can pass their requests to Netflix through the proxy, which obscures the source IP address of the devices. Netflix knows the proxy server is a genuine source and will return the requested content to it. It can then pass the content through to the requesting devices.
Do you need special hardware for using proxy servers? No, this proxy server could be a specific streaming proxy server or VPN. The proxy server could be a server in a data center or even your personal laptop. The main goal is to group requests from all devices wishing to access Netflix and pass them through a single, whitelisted IP address attached to our account.
Why Netflix Shouldn’t be Worried About VPNs and Proxy Servers
The method described above really should not concern Netflix. To be able to set up a proxy server requires a certain amount of technical knowledge. Beyond setup, proxy servers and VPNs usually have a limit of devices you can use on their paid plans (a common number is 5 devices per account). Even using the method above, you still may not be able to have all of your extended family and friends use one account.
Beyond device limits for VPN accounts, device types, and VPN usage rates reveal only a small group of users could watch Netflix using a proxy server. Around 70% of Netflix user devices are televisions. While televisions are the go-to device for streaming, they are a minority share of all devices using VPNs for web traffic at roughly 10%.
A final point that makes proxy networks of little concern for Netflix is the VPN or proxy server monthly costs. These servers aren’t cheap, as the average monthly price of a VPN plan is $10. You can get free VPN plans, but these often have single-device limits, so you will probably have to get a paid plan. As of this writing, the basic Netflix account costs $9.99 per month, or the same cost as a paid VPN. Unless you already pay for a VPN or proxy server it does not make financial sense to use a VPN for bypassing the household policy.
Netflix implemented the household policy to cut into the 100 million shared accounts. This number was huge and a great target. After taking out low-hanging fruit, companies must evaluate the effect of diminishing returns for further policies. The potential number of proxy streaming televisions is low, and probably not worth the effort to address. Even if some of these devices go around the household policy, Netflix will still have solved a source of revenue loss.
Final Thoughts
Can you get around Netflix’s new single-household viewing policy? Yes. With the right amount of network engineering, proxy servers, IP spoofing, and device configuration you should be able to get around paying for extra users or new accounts. While this is possible, the amount of effort, along with the monthly charges of your VPN or proxy server raises the question of why not just pay for an extra user or new account? If you can get your setup right, Netflix can probably compile a list of VPN services, ping their servers to determine IP addresses and blacklist all these IP addresses. You can spend your time how you want, but ripping off Netflix to save a few bucks a month seems like a waste of time and effort.
