Multiple users may soon be able to make the most of the same Netflix account by way of numerous Facebook log-ins on the same subscription.
That's the dream of Netflix's chief product officer, Neil Hunt, who revealed the project to TechRadar during a private interview at the streaming service's UK launch.
One of the benefits of Netflix is its recommendations engine, which offers supremely personalised genre selections based on how you've rated other films (for example, "critically-acclaimed visually-striking cerebral films" and "wacky foreign comedies" or simply "exciting crime films").
Those wacky 'foreign' comedies just slay me
But if you're sharing an account with the rest of your household, these could become diluted quickly by your cohabitants' personal (some might say terrible) tastes.
We asked Hunt what the company was going to do about that and he offered us three options; predictably option one was to buy two subscriptions and option two was to just make do. But option three sounded a bit more promising:
"The third answer is that we certainly have ambitions to provide to the multiple individualised personality profiles."
By individualised personality profiles, we're pretty sure he means 'people'.
"One of the models that I'm contemplating is that maybe if you connect two or three different Facebook accounts to one subscription, then you can kind of say 'Okay, I'm Kate, these are my signals or inputs [ratings and preferences]'.
"And maybe when you launch the thing it says, 'Are you 'Kate' or are you 'boyfriend'?' And you choose and you get your personal presentation."
Great, sign us up. Or get back to us when it's ready, which sounds as though it may be quite far in the future:
"There are a lot of issues to solve with that. But it's sort of a point that we see [Netflix] as a work in progress - it's not finished, it's not done," explained Hunt.
"We have lots of work to do in lots of areas, in personalisation, in social stuff, in developments like that.
"But the fact that most of these user interfaces are essentially delivered in HTML, even to the smart TVs and games consoles, means that we continue to extend week by week, month by month, to deliver new features, to deliver new capabilities, and we have goals and ambitions for that kind of stuff."
Despite appearances, not everyone is nor wants to be on Facebook; we're sure Netflix will make provisions for these people in their multiple-personality strategy.
Netflix came under fire at launch for its seeming requirement for users to connect their accounts to Facebook, although the company later clarified that this is not actually the case.
