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[Shu Manwill]

A January 31 story on The Streamable suggested that Netflix users watching from multiple locations would have to ensure that any device used to stream titles from a location other than the primary household would have to log in from the primary household and watch something there at least once every 31 days. 9to5mac quoted similar wording from the FAQ page, including the 31-day stipulation.

As of now, the FAQ page does not mention anything about a 31-day window in which users must log their devices into the primary home network, so the company may have walked back that measure in the short time since announcing it.

Members on a Standard or Premium plan can purchase additional member slots for people outside their household. Standard plan users can add one extra member while Premium users can add two extra members to their plans.

Those additional members get full access to the subscription tier of the primary account holder but get their own unique account and password. Their account is simply paid for directly through the primary account holder.

You might be using a password for your Netflix account that you also use for another service. While that may not be a great practice for security reasons, you might still want to keep your password private while sharing your Netflix account with a family number. You can do so by using a password manager.

Most password managers have a password-sharing feature that lets you share your password in a discreet way with your contacts. As long as the person you want to share your password with also has the same password manager installed, the software will take care of automatically logging in without showing your actual password to another party.

Our Linksys router died recently. After not making it more than about 2 years on our last two Linksys routers, I decided to come back and give Netgear a try. I'd had good luck with them in the past. I purchased a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 Wireless Router. For the most part I am very pleased with our new router. Wired connections are fast and stable. Wi-Fi is fast and stable on either network with one exception. I cannot get Netflix to work consistently over Wi-Fi on our Samsung tablets. Every device that is wired works well and Netflix has no issues. If we use our Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.5 tablets to connect, the app will start and, when switching to the library/selection screen, we get the little swirling busy icon for about ten seconds, then the app crashes back to the home screen. We have no issues whatsoever if we turn our phones into mobile hotspots and connect to them. We have no issues on any other Wi-Fi networks that we have attempted to use. The only time we have this problem is on our home Wi-Fi network administered by our R7000 router.

I called tech support a few weeks ago, and they walked me through performing a factory reset on our router, thinking maybe something didn't take quite right during our initial setup. They walked me through initial setup again. Once we were done, bam!, Netflix was back and was working well. However, within a couple of days, the same problem started. The Android Netflix app was crashing on our home network. Again, no problems over mobile data and no problems on any other Wi-Fi network we checked. The problem was only exhibited through our home network. If I reset the network and perform initial setup again, Netflix will work fine again, for a limited time; anywhere from a couple of hours to a few days. Since installing our new router, I have not been able to make it more than three or four days without this problem arising and requiring a factory reset to "fix" it.

It definitely looks like it is a Linksys issue. The funny thing is, until my Linksys router died, we had no issues whatsoever. Everything worked fine with the range extender on our network. It took that router dying and setting up our new Netgear for the issue to manifest. Now though, our issues sound exactly like everyone on that thread.

On the off-chance that this could help with my issue, I looked at the link you provided and followed the instructions there. I came up with with an optimum MTU of 1500. When I check my router settings, MTU Size is already set at 1500.

Ok, it was a stab in the dark. I can't think of any reason why the R7000 could cause your Netflix app to crash. The only thing it does to the traffic is NAT. Most of the time that should be transparent to applications.

Thank you anyway for the suggestion. It was worth a shot. I'm just hoping someone may see the post and it will sound familiar to an issue they had or something and maybe they'll have a suggestion that works. I'll give it a few days and then call tech support again.

The only problem with that is that they want to ask 50 bajillion questions about things not related to the router, seemingly in hopes of steering towards the problem being something other than their equipment. I know they have to rule out certain things to get at the issue and they have a flow chart to follow, but it gets frustrating.

Well, I spent about an hour on the phone with tech support. They were very nice and didn't take me through too many insanely basic steps. They listened to what else I had tried and basically took off from there with very little back-tracking. Even though I was at the most recent firmware version, they had me manually update it. Then we reset to factory defaults and went through initial setup again. After that, they had me change the DNS servers to the Google DNS servers, which didn't help before when I first tried it. Then they took me to QoS Setup to adjust Downstream QoS. We enabled that to prioritize video streaming.

After all of that, the Netflix app starts just fine on our Samsung tablets and videos play and everything works great. Of course, it always did after I performed factory reset and ran setup again. We changed so many things that I don't know if any one of them or the combination of changes fixed it. All I know is that it's working now and I'm good with that, assuming the problem doesn't return in a few days. If it does, I'll post here for anyone that may be having similar issues in the future. If you don't see a reply from me within a few days, maybe a week, you'll know we're still good and that this fixed our problem. If you're experiencing similar issues, I'd give all of this a try and see if it helps you.

OK, well, as hopeful as I was, the last fix didn't take care of my problem. As a matter of fact, my problem only remained "fixed" for approximately 15 minutes before returning. I went on to make two more phone calls to tech support that lasted almost two full hours altogether. They had me changing all sorts of strange and obscure settings and, each successive time, the "fix" lasted for less and less time. To me, it definitely appeared to be a hardware issue that was getting worse and worse. And let's face it, to use Netflix over wi-fi shouldn't take a bunch of jumping through flaming hoops just to get it to work. I mean, I know there may be settings and parameters that can improve performance, but we're talking just getting and keeping it working at all, and it really shouldn't take all that. It should work right out of the box.

In the end, when we started the fourth call and what would have likely been about my fifth total hour on the phone with support for this issue, I told them that I had a defective router and that we wouldn't be doing any additional troubleshooting. I told them it was being returned and that, if they ever got their hands on my bad one, they could troubleshoot it to their hearts content; just without me.

I returned it to Wal-Mart and exchanged it for another of the same model. It has received good reviews and mine was great for general web surfing and downloading. It was only this one issue. If my new one starts the same thing, I'll likely be switching brands, but I'm hopeful that I just got a lemon and that my new one will be fine.

Well, our problem, whatever it is, whatever is causing it, is back.

I took our Netgear R7000 back to the store and exchanged it for another, identical model. I hooked it up and ran it through setup Wednesday morning. Everything went without a hitch and Netflix worked perfectly on our tablets, until this morning, Friday. We made it two days. Now the same thing is happening all over again. The Netflix app starts on our Android tablets, starts to load the library screen, the busy icon pops up for about five seconds, then the app crashes back to the Android Home Screen.

I have, once again, confirmed that this happens on every wireless Android device that we have, and that Netflix still works fine on them on other wireless networks. Netflix works fine on our home network on our iPhones. Netflix works fine on our wired devices, a Tivo, our Amazon Fire TV, our Roku, and either of our two Samsung Smart TVs. This problem only affects our Android wireless devices, and only on our Netgear Wi-Fi.

If I perform a factory default reset of the router, and run it through initial setup again, Netflix will once again start working on our wireless Android devices, for a short period, and after every consecutive reset/setup cycle, the amount of time before things go south gets less and less.

I am beyond frustrated and I have no idea where to turn now, or what to do.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks.

Maybe I should've waited before my last update. This afternoon, I started thinking about what all we have on our wireless network that could potentially impact it. Our range extender came to mind. We have a Linksys RE6500 AC1200 Range Extender to extend our wireless network into the back half of our house. I started wondering if that could have an impact. I went to the back and unplugged the extender and then rebooted the R7000 router. I connected to the wireless network as soon as it came back up. Bam! Netflix works like charm. I went to the back and plugged the extender back in. Almost immediately, the crashing Netflix app problem came back to our Android devices. I unplugged the extender again, and didn't even bother rebooting the router this time. Netflix started working again. I went back and forth like this, just experimenting. Every time I turned off the range extender, Netflix would work on our Android devices. As soon as I'd turn the extender back on, the crashing behavior would start back up.

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