This morning, I jumped on to Michael's Insight blog as I do about once a month to find an article pointing to some news about Netflix that pertains to my earlier post about Netflix's poor family support for streaming.  The GigaOM article mentions family plans and Michael's Insight simply reported that as the truth but if you read the Investor FAQ, it isn't quite that clear.

More recently, as streaming has become central to our business, we believe there may be an opportunity to change our focus from a household relationship to an individual relationship, since streaming is viewed on personal devices, such as phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions. As we think about this shift from a household to a personal relationship, we are starting to think internally that our opportunity could be viewed as the number of mobile phone subscribers, a group that both invests in electronic content and can afford $7.99 for home entertainment. Needless to say, that is a large opportunity. 

I can see how this could be interpreted to mean "Family Plans" but what it seems to mean is that Netflix is looking to make individual plans cost competitive for families.  The drive seems to be coming from the cell phone industry and the recent announcement of Facebook integration.  The idea is that while DVD's are sent to a household, streams are sent to individual devices which in the case of computers, netbooks, tablets and cell phones are person devices.  TVs are the only truly shared devices that streaming services can be sent to so maintaining the "household" distinction in its business model prevents them from evolving the service and making more money.  That said, I hope the GigaOM interpretation is correct.

If Netflix implements individual plans, I can only hope that they implement a "Family" plan where a master account can control sub accounts or profiles.  How they implement an individual focus leaves quite a few questions unanswered.


Will I have to increase the number of DVDs I can have out in order to get the improved "Family Plan"? The GigaOM arrticle suggest that the two are tied to one another.

Will it work seamlessly with my Xbox Live Family plan?

Can parental controls be set individually for each person? 

Is each person a distinct account or a sub-profile of one account?

Will each person be able to have their own streaming history?

Will each person have their own queue?

Finally, When will it be released. Better streaming functionality is a long time coming and very much overdue.

References:

http://gigaom.com/video/netflix-multiple-streams-family-plans/

http://www.michaelsinsight.com/2011/04/netflix-working-on-family-streaming-plans.html

http://ir.netflix.com/faqTopQ.cfm