How to share your access to media with family and simultaneously sweep the annual nerdy nephew of the year awards

A couple months ago I was hanging out with my aunt, and she mentioned her cable+internet bill was around $250 per month. I thought that was insane and that I should do something about it. She's a 75 year old retiree that watches baseball and the hallmark channel, and she shouldn't have to pay as much as a car payment every month to do it.

There has to be a better way!

I decided to try an idea I've had in my head, and I want to tell you that it worked perfectly and if you want to repeat the process for people in your life in similar situations, it's pretty easy.

Step 1: Figure out all the media you can access yourself, then add them as a user

I've been a cord cutter for years and at this point, I spend a ton on streaming services. I have accounts with YouTubeTV for live stuff, YouTube Premium, Max/Discovery, Peacock, Hulu, Netflix, MLB, NWSL+, WNBA, ESPN+, Paramount+, Amazon Prime, Plex, and AppleTV+. Long ago, when the internet was young, I'd try to grab movies and tv from college file servers, but things are so dead-easy with streaming now that I pay for services to watch the shows I want to watch instead.

But, here's the good part. All these services allow you to share your account with others in your family. So the first thing I did was add my aunt as a new profile on all my services.

Everything I already pay for now has one more user attached. Most services allow you to have six or more family members sharing your account, so it's not that big of a deal for my own family of three. Granted—my aunt lives in a different US state than I do—but I'll explain how to get around any limitations of that in the next steps.

Step 2: Load Tailscale on every device you use

Tailscale is a service that lets you create a virtual private network (VPN) between all your devices. I've written about it before, but if you ever need to access your home computer while you're away, or if you've ever needed to jump onto your home network's IP range when traveling while trying to watch the end of a basketball game (that is blacked out locally), Tailscale can help you with that. If you run file servers or web servers at home, Tailscale makes it easy-peasy to connect to them from anywhere you are.

Step 3: Buy an AppleTV and set it up with Tailscale and streaming apps

I'd been ribbing my aunt for years about her old small TV and how slow the Roku box is that she uses for streaming apps, so on my most recent visit, we went to her local Best Buy. I bought her a larger 4K TV and a new AppleTV, and since electronics are relatively cheap now, it was around $500 in total.

I swapped the new TV with her old one, then set up the AppleTV. I went into the AppleTV's System settings and turned off location services. Then I loaded the Tailscale app on it. I opened the Tailscale app and followed the QR code to login to my own Tailscale account so I could add her AppleTV to my network of devices. Then, in her Tailscale app, I enabled an exit node connection to my file server at my home for all her AppleTV's internet traffic.

Now, in this configuration, she has an Oregon IP address shared with every device inside my home, so to these streaming services it's like another TV in my house networking-wise. After that, I downloaded and logged her into all the streaming apps.

We fired up some shows and movies and everything worked flawlessly. About the only small nitpick-y thing is that YouTubeTV gives her local channels from my home base of Portland, Oregon instead of her local Los Angeles channels she got on cable TV before—not the end of the world.

Step 4: Let your aunt cancel her cable TV and save $200 per month

Once we had everything working, she ditched her cable box the next day. Now her monthly bill is about $50 for fiber internet that runs around 500Mbps speeds. My home internet is 600Mbps fiber, so it doesn't slow things down too much to funnel her traffic through my server.

She has a family profile on YouTubeTV and we added a bunch of her favorite shows to her library. She gets to share my YouTube Premium account so no more annoying ad breaks. She can watch any movie on Max, or any show on Paramount+ and let me tell you that boy howdy do they have a lot of cop, fire department, and hospital shows made especially for old people on Paramount.

Anyway, that's all there was to it, and I was glad to help my aunt out—she is easily my favorite extended family member and now she gets to watch pretty much anything she wants any time she wants from here on out.

And she can do it all with just one simple remote control.