A report about a long-term hospital patient losing access to his Netflix account due to failure to check in from his home IP address recently made waves on Hacker News recently. Having written often about a close cousin of this issue, DRM and ownership, one might think I have some detailed assessment of why Netflix is bad. But I am going to surprise you and attack this issue from another angle. I had a one week stint in the hospital which encompassed Christmas back in 2018 (Christmas Eve surgery will always be a special memory). I was at NYU Langone in Manhattan and my room had a massive TV (it’s a nice hospital…). How did I take advantage of that TV? I mostly had Spectrum News NY1 on loop. Why? I was way too low energy to focus on a TV show or something like that.
(For the record, I hope Netflix resolves the issue so the poor gentleman awaiting his double lung transplant can have something to watch while he is in the hospital.)