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Offering streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.)

  • January 20, 2026
  • 5 replies
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Tom Beerley
Top Contributor
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I’m curious to hear how other hosts are offering Netflix, Hulu, etc. in their units. I am starting to hit the “scalability wall” with the way I’ve been doing it so far.

The way I’ve been doing it so far has been to simply have an extra profile under each of my personal streaming accounts. The “guest profile” is named in a way that’s obvious to guests and it sits alongside the profiles for my other family members. My personal profiles are PIN-locked as needed so that people don’t rent movies, change my subscription plan, etc. 

Netflix is the most forgiving as far as enabling me to use a single account across 5 STRs (plus my personal home). On the other end, Hulu is the most restrictive, as far as constantly booting TVs off and having to go through the “update household” method to get them back on.

Once in a while a guest says something like “Netflix/Hulu isn’t working, what do I do?” and I have to tell them to click “update household” and/or to have it send me a code so that I can relay the code back to them for authentication.

And sometimes guests log me out completely so that they can log in as themselves, and sometimes they forget to log out, or even worse, they DO log out, and now the next guest is not logged in at all, which is a pain to deal with. (Special thanks though to our guest “kittybunz” who logged into Paramount 3 years ago -- a service we don’t even pay for -- and we are still using it to this day LOL). 

We’re on the hunt for property #6 and I think my poor-man’s solution is at its end. I would love to hear how others are doing it, and hopefully the answer is not to create a separate account for EVERY streaming service multiplied by EVERY property :-) 

5 replies

anthonyrallo
Inspiring
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  • January 20, 2026

@Tom Beerley - We tried this same approach until the streaming services started getting stricter. Now we simply just let them login themselves and we only provide a suite of services at our highest end properties. 

It’s not sustainable to pay for these services at each STR location (even cracked versions of the streaming services for those people that play in that arena….)

I’d test NOT offering it and see how it lands with your guests. I’m betting it won’t phase them.


Jess
New Participant
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  • January 21, 2026

Hi Tom!

We self manage 5 of our own properties/listings. We initially tried and were successful with offering Netflix, HBO Max and Amazon Prime using our own personal accounts.  Once we hit 5 listings and the providers became a little restrictive we changed a little what we offer.

Each of our properties now have their own Netflix account we pay for, just using a separate email address. All are still logged in to our Amazon Prime account, just restricted with a PIN and we dont offer HBO Max anymore.

We figure offering Netflix and Prime is sufficient enough, never any complaints, people log in to other apps on their own. Has been fine for over a year now.

-Jess and Drew


Tom Beerley
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  • January 22, 2026

@Jess I think that’s probably the direction we’re headed in… or a variant of it at least. I don’t have much trouble with Netflix being shared, but Hulu is always the pain. The Disney/Hulu/Max bundle is a pretty good value, but interestingly, those 3 have differing levels of strictness with regard to multiple logins. But it could still be worth paying for that bundle on a per-property basis and just not use the Hulu. 


anthonyrallo
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  • January 22, 2026

@Tom Beerley ​@Jess - The good thing about Netflix is you can ADD users (in other locations) at a lower cost than their own subscription (look for ADD A MEMBER). They must be in the same country though…. Hope that helps!


Tom Beerley
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  • January 22, 2026

@anthonyrallo thanks for reminding me of that… Our son is using 1 of the 2 “additional user” slots but it might probably help to let our condos utilize the second slot. Since our home is in a different state than our STRs, that will help spread things out among the three total allowable slots.