How does Netflix determine household?

This is a question that's often thrown around Twitter but not all that well explained.

I have asked a few people who work for Netflix but still don't have the answer, and their answer is We don't know. So that's what I'm doing. Here's the best information I have so far on the subject.

If you read this, make sure you do it in public so anyone else can find out you're a complete imbecile. I'll do my best to explain: we take information on our website which includes various properties such as our sign-up form, and our order form, our FAQ page, and the like, and combine it with information on what properties are available to subscribe to, the current state of affairs in a particular country and more (the last two properties are things I don't have access to at the moment, but I will post them soon), and some other data. We then go through our database of past traffic patterns and combine them with those same properties to work out which countries and regions are the most popular ones to subscribe to Netflix, and which regions are the least popular. Then, we apply our business rules to see how many households are in that country or region, and then work out how many households a given amount of revenue would generate. Once we have a number, we work out how much content we have to license. Given that, we then calculate the average cost per stream (how much it costs us to license a single stream) for a given piece of content in that market. Finally, we add up all of the content that we own in that market and take a weighted average cost per stream for the content we own. If you're interested, you can find the math in the source code for our pricing system.

And what if someone has two TVs connected to a single household? It's possible that one person lives alone and has only one TV, but if that person has both a laptop and a smartphone, Netflix might assume that the two devices are in fact one computer, for the purposes of licensing the content.

Is Netflix stopping household sharing?

When we look back at the way Netflix has grown over the last couple of years, one of the areas of growth is streaming.

Streaming is a huge part of the growth, as it's how Netflix was able to grow faster than most other SVOD services (at least on annual basis). However, we've been watching Netflix for a long time and we see that recently there's been a shift in usage from households.

It appears Netflix has stopped household sharing. How can this be? At the time of writing, only 20% of users are accessing content from their own account. That's down slightly from 27% in Q4 2025.

In the last 3 months of 2025, the average household was using Netflix a total of 39.98 hours per month. That was up 6.4% on the previous quarter and up 10% year on year.

Looking at 2025, the average household spent a total of 699.22 hours watching content on their own account. That was down 7% on the previous year and up 15% year on year.

That's a massive amount of viewing per household, or a quarter of a whole TV show, but we're not seeing the same household growth in streaming that we have previously. If Netflix is not seeing its subscriber growth on its own streaming platform, we could be seeing a trend of it stopping household sharing and focusing on its own growth.

To put this into perspective, the top ten movies watched by households in the last quarter of 2025 were: How can Netflix be stopping household sharing when it has been doing so well? While we're looking at the Netflix business, we need to put it into context. It's very easy to look at one line in a chart and say that the company has stopped household sharing, but we have to look at the whole picture.

Looking at the whole picture, we can see that Netflix has three key reasons to stop household sharing. These reasons include: The rise of internet connections in the home. The rise of smart TVs. The rise of new and emerging markets. Let's look at each of these. 1) The rise of internet connections in the home. When we look at the internet connections in the home, we're seeing a big jump.

Can I use Netflix in two different houses?

What I'm saying is this: if I was a subscriber of Netflix, would it be possible to use the same account on two different devices (eg one iPad, and one Kindle Fire) but have two different Netflix accounts (one for each device)? My only problem with this is that I'm not sure whether they would allow you to switch between accounts on two devices with the same email address. But, I think it's unlikely because, after all, how many people would ever want to use two accounts on two devices? And I can't imagine the account switching would take that long anyway.

But, I just don't know. I don't own Netflix so I have no idea. I would guess that if you switch to an account that's not your own, you'd lose all your data.

Related. 12 thoughts on ? I guess if it's going to be used like you're suggesting (as long as you're switching devices but still using the same email), then it would be fine, but if you use the Netflix app on the devices and have to login to Netflix, then you'd lose all your data. I'm not sure if it's even possible at all to switch accounts on the same email address without losing all your data, but if you can get your parents to sign up for the account, then you could use that one instead. @Daniel B: I think what you are saying is that you don't want to have to log into two different accounts, even if you use one at a time. I'm pretty sure you could just use the Netflix app on the iPad and Kindle Fire and login to the account you already have set up for the iPad, and vice versa.

I think it is possible to use Netflix on two devices and have separate accounts. I do not believe that if you were to use your account on your iPad/Kindle Fire you would lose the data that you have entered into Netflix.