YouTube Is Pausing Premium Family Plans if You Aren't Watching From the Same Address (cnet.com) 65
An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're sharing an ad-free YouTube Premium or YouTube Music account with friends or family who live outside of your home, you could lose your premium privileges. Customers who lose these can still watch YouTube or listen to music with ads -- but let's be real, it's not the same.
Multiple reports have shown people who have the service have been receiving notices that their premium service will be paused for 15 days due to violating a policy that's been in place since 2023. On its support page, YouTube says that an account manager can add up to five family members in a household to their Premium membership. But, the post says, "Family members sharing a YouTube family plan must live in the same household as the family manager."
Multiple reports have shown people who have the service have been receiving notices that their premium service will be paused for 15 days due to violating a policy that's been in place since 2023. On its support page, YouTube says that an account manager can add up to five family members in a household to their Premium membership. But, the post says, "Family members sharing a YouTube family plan must live in the same household as the family manager."
Netflix pulled this crap on use - it's gone now. (Score:4, Interesting)
Netflix has been pulling this crap, and even though we were all watching from the same address (using the same internet connection - no VPNs or any tricks like that), it started booting one of us randomly about it.
As I told them, this is bullshit, and I don't pay for bullshit. So we no longer have a subscription to Netflix.
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Re: Netflix pulled this crap on use - it's gone no (Score:2)
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NAT was only created as a "short-term" way to mitigate the lack of IPv4 addresses available [rfc-editor.org]. So they are, quite literally, using the internet as it was intended if they're using IPv6 as well.
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People who think NAT is a security layer are the true morons.
Re: Netflix pulled this crap on use - it's gone no (Score:1)
What the other commenters are trying to tell you, but quite summarized, is that Netflix can only âoeseeâ your firewallâ(TM)s IP address. You are using Network Address Translation at the perimeter of your network, which is why the devices inside your network can each have their own IP addresses and still access the Internet through the one address on your firewall.
I recommend you look into a YouTube videos on how TCP/IP, NAT, firewalls and network routing work.
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No, I'm not. I have unique, public IPV4 addresses for all my machines, which are also firewalled. Thanks for you lesson, though.
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I'm impressed, gaslighting and mansplaining in the same post all while coming across as a condescending prick. A perfect trifecta.
Re: Netflix pulled this crap on use - it's gone no (Score:2)
I was wondering how this "must be in the same place" works for households now that increasingly nobody shares internet connection anymore and everyone just have their own mobile subscription. But I guess phones have GPS.
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What if I have more than one residence?
You're not buying a "service", you're buy^H^H^Hpaying a license^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hextortion fee to use a service at a specific location only.
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They're going to have trouble in Court claiming they have a unique and different definition of "household" than the law defines.
FTC isn't pleased with Google's behavior in recent years.
"Pray I don't alter it further" may have worked when they were partnering with the previous Administration to censor the base of the current Administration.
It's like nobody has a home IP and a random mobile IP because it's 2001 or something.
Maybe they'll just kill Premium and try to force everybody onto YouTube TV. At some po
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These companies need to careful (Score:2)
There are now so many ways to watch youtube ad free on mobile devices or TV devices that I'll terminate my subscription if they want to play that game.
I have a family plan and my family members use it on their phones over 4G / 5G so they will have different IP addresses.
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my family members use it on their phones over 4G / 5G so they will have different IP addresses.
And if Location Services are turned on in those phones, then Google likely knows where they are regardless of IP addresses.
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Sure, but my subscription contract doesn't specify that you have location services enabled. Or that you should watch from your home only, your kids can't have sleepovers, you can't watch on vacation, at work, or anywhere they don't approve of, before labelling you as a pirate or a cheapskate.
The recent changes to streaming subscriptions - ads, crackdown on "sharing", shows that are either absurdly woke, or plain vulgar, cemented it: no more streaming subscriptions. I will pirate everything from now on, just
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Bummer (Score:2)
My wife watches locally on the couch on the TV and I watch 4 yards away on my PC with a VPN saying I'm thousands of miles away.
People pay for YouTube? (Score:2)
Re:People pay for YouTube? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty reasonable, comes with some content (Father Ted is one I play every now and again), no YouTube ads, and the music streaming service.
I pay for it and feel like it's a fair price.
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Youtube has ads?
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Yup, and believe it or not some people pay for the content with ads. Some pay for money. Some just stream it with blockers. Others avoid it because there's too much advertising.
I tend to do the first or the last option, but with the music service included it seemed worth it to me to switch to paying.
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YouTube ads are intolerable for me, plus I understand that content creators get paid a bit more for Premium views than a normal view, so that's mainly why I do it.
They've also recently added a nice "commonly skipped" feature that lets you fast-forward past sponsored segments easily. It's kind of screwing over creators who rely on sponsored content, but they're already getting paid more from my Premium views.
Of course you can also do this with Revanced or SmartTube, if you have the patience to wrestle with a
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No other streaming service can keep up with the new content added daily to Youtube.
I have found that I only need to initially find and add about 10 channel subscriptions in order to have one of them upload something new and really good each day
That's all I need.
I really recommend it.
Sure Youtube is pulling the same stunt as everyone else - pay extra for no ads - but I found the value on Youtube is heaps better than
Kids away at school (Score:3)
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The class action should be fun.
IRS says they're part of your household.
But the kids well just use Revanced if they make paying harder than not paying.
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Official residence != living in the same household. It may come as a shock to you but everyone in private industry doesn't follow the same definition as applied by the government. And would you want them to? What would that looklike? Will you share all your SSNs with Google along with a declaration they can check official residence from your tax filings or whatever register you appear on?
Solution (Score:5, Informative)
https://github.com/yuliskov/Sm... [github.com]
https://vanced.to/ [vanced.to]
Both work well. (Score:2)
I find it absurd to pay for fiction so I don't, and their user base proves I'm far from alone.
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Google .. the Microsoft of the new millenium (Score:3)
Literally everything Google has ever done has seen massive enshitification.
A tax-avoiding, money sucking, hyper-bureaucratic global monster.
No, the next Sears... (Score:2)
Google is mismanaged much like Sears was. Google had search... but search is dead. They had ads... but there are now so many options for ads, and at least 75 new ad tech companies each week, and now that search is dead, nobody sees google ads. Google was responsible for the renewed interest in AI... and did some amazing work on some amazing projects... but killed all those in favor of Gemini. And they can only get people to use Gemini through deceit and dark patterns. So, when the AI frenzy dies some time i
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Bill Hicks had the right idea (Score:2)
If you work in advertising or marketing...
Bye-bye Netflix, I get the hint (Score:2)
Right now our family is split in two locations for one of the roughly 10 thousand reasons such a thing commonly happens to families, and also, perhaps even more than that, one of the reasons we HAVE services like Netflix is to be able to use them while traveling. Which almost always involves one or more people traveling while one or more stays home.
In short, bye-bye Netflix. Too expensive and the quality has been going down steadily since 2010 or whenever anyway.
But... (Score:3)
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What if I have 3 different home addresses?
Then someone lives outside your home obviously. Get another family plan for the other homes.
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No it's not "obvious." My wife and I own 3 properties. One is commercial, the other two are residential. That might paint us as extremely wealthy but neither property is huge. We're fairly middle class. We use both residential properties interchangeably because they're not huge houses and we like our space. We could sell both and move into a single dwelling but we like things the way they are. Especially now that our daughters are adults in their twenties, who still live at home for the time being, but have
New service - Family VPN (Score:1)
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Google, or rather DuckDuckGo "home vpn server".
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Not a simple task though I'm afraid.
Er... unreasonable unilateral contract violation? (Score:2)
Over 90% of my family's connections are from our home, but most of the rest is from our data plan, so it's three more IP addresses plus when I'm at my job.
They do that, I'll complain.
Who knows if I won't sue for mal practice.
wedding bills to pay (Score:2)
Sincerely,
Jeff B.
What do they think a family plan is? (Score:2)
You expect me to pay more so that my wife and kids that live in the same house can all watch TV? Why? Nope. Gonna get a single plane for that.
Family plan means multiple locations. That is what the customer expects, that is what you gave them.
Do not downgrade what you sold that met the customer's expectations simply because you do not want to meet the customer's expectations.
faimly viewing (Score:2)
Is the problem that people are seeing free videos& (Score:2)
Re:Is the problem that people are seeing free vide (Score:2)
Yes.
F YouTube (Score:2)
selfhosted streaming the only solution to bullshit (Score:1)
plex jellyfin emby; blurays and dvds are a dime a dozen used and UDHR27 makes personal use 'piracy' fairuse, so fee free to sail the high sees without ever making/spending a cent.
How considerate of you Google (Score:2)
Now how about pausing the plan if no one is watching at all?
That's just malicious (Score:2)
their premium service will be paused for 15 days due to violating a policy that's been in place since 2023
Surely if Google can detect that the logins come from devices "outside the home" they can just block them. "Pausing" a service you paid for is just malicious.
The second I see an ad Google is gone for me (Score:1)
The second I see an ad on YouTube Google is gone for me, and not only me, I'm sure of that. And I know that this will happen soon, and unfortunately for them I am actually prepared to go into 0$/mo to Google. I'm just waiting for an excuse, and by God, do they seem eager to give it to me.
But what they should be asking is what are the people we're annoying doing? Are they... don't know, more than household managers? Maybe they make work-related decisions that might affect future business for us?”