>I’m also surprised they haven’t cracked down on the source IP addresses. It’d be trivial to look at the net bandwidth and see that the usage is at a totally different physical address (and not just a mobile phone).
I regularly use these services when I'm traveling. If any of them start restricting me to my home IP (which isn't static anyway) or otherwise start making it harder for me to use their service, I'll be dropping them in a hurry. There's a lot of content out there and not really any that I must have.
I’m referring to massive consistent usage from the same IP. Most residential IP addresses are dynamic but remain fixed for weeks or months at a time. It’d be easy to see that the same IP not associated with the actual customer account has streamed every day for the past month.
Hell I bet they could go a step further and identify the exact person as well! There’s so little competition that it’s likely the account holder and sharer are on the same ISP (ex: you both have Comcast). They would know the name and account on the sharer’s source IP and, more importantly, that it’s not the original account owner.
As long as they are careful and work their way down from the most egregious offendors, it wouldn't be such a big deal.
They could also do techniques like gentle shaming "Your account has been used from 46 locations in 7 states today. We might start charging for this level of account-sharing in the future"
I regularly use these services when I'm traveling. If any of them start restricting me to my home IP (which isn't static anyway) or otherwise start making it harder for me to use their service, I'll be dropping them in a hurry. There's a lot of content out there and not really any that I must have.