Family Subscription

My wife and I both have Zunes.  I have the subscription but she does not.  We are also thinking about getting Zunes for our kids.

It would be great if we could have a parent account with three sub accounts tied to it.  The first one would be at full price and the sub accounts would be at a discount (similar to how cell phone companies do family plans).  This would allow me to have just one bill and also keep and eye on what content my kids are downloading. but we would still have separate download lists.

really cool idea but then that presents the problem of random people just connecting together getting a subscription and then people just getting discounts. You can attach up to 3 zunes to one account so you and your wife could both have a subscription and attach your kids to them but that still doesnt solve the problem of the seperate download list..anyone else?

There will always be folks who will try to scam the system.  One way you could possible tie accounts together like this would be to stipulate that the plan would be limited to three accounts tied together at the same address.  Then they could use registering the Zune hardware as data to show they are at the same local.

This would mean that random people getting together would have to be willing to register their product with at another persons address. The folks who want to take advantage of a system will always find a way to do this.

As for separate play lists most of this could be done on the billing side so it should not be too much of an issue.  For accounts already set up you would have to pick one as the parent account and then choose to tie the other accounts to it.  The system would then verify the registration information and attach the billing information together.

Certainly this is not a perfect plan but nothing in a prototyping phase ever is

While solving this has some interesting implications from a UI design and a DRM point of view, it's clear that family subscription scenarios are important.  We are thinking of how to improve the value proposition for Zune Pass for customers and please continue to give your feedback as you use your Zune Pass.

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Zune Marketplace Developer This posting is provided "as-is" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

I use my Zune pass with my Family. We have one account with Zune pass that we log into to download music with. Then, when I want to use the Social features, I log into another account. So far, everything has worked out great, with my Zune associating to both accounts in their respective places, but the one hole in the system is the new feature that allows you to save Zune cards to the device. Because the songs will only download when logged into your account, and your account must have Zune Pass to download, it won't do it. Perhaps you guys can make it so the computer and Zune simply remember their Zune pass status on all accounts and apply it to all accounts on that system, without spreading to other systems on non-Zune pass accounts?