Netflix: Limit the Number of Screens Each User Can Watch

📕 Here are some good solutions we found for this question:

No solutions available online, but here is the best we could find:

On Mobile and TVs, Because you are running the app, you have access to certain device identifiers. For example, on iOS, you can get the phone model, and advertising identifier for a device. You can use this data to record a device on a backend cache.

On web, you can use the IP address and create a browser session. You can use that as a key to a table maintaining sessions for a user.

With a combination of the above, you can identify how many users are watching from an account at any given time.


🙋 Here are some details you should know about this question:

How do you identify each device?

Once you do, how do you keep track of the number of users watching it?

How do you scale this at a global level - with millions of users watching at once?


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