Sharing Netflix accounts is going to get more complicated. This Tuesday, May 23, the streaming company announced its desire to restrict connections with the same access codes. Users from the United States, France and a hundred other countries will now have to pay a supplement to be able to share their Netflix password with people who are not members of the same household.
The streaming veteran has been testing this new formula for a year, and has already implemented it in Canada in particular, after a difficult year 2022, marked by subscriber losses in the first half, before bouncing back in the second.
“Over 100 million households share their accounts, which affects our ability to invest in great movies and TV series,” Netflix said in a February statement. Prices vary by country: US households will now have to pay nearly $8 more per month to authorize a guest to use their account. In France, it will be 6 euros monthly, as in Spain, instead of 4 euros in Portugal, two countries where the measure has already been introduced.
“Your Netflix account is for you and for the people who live with you, that is, your household,” reads an email from the platform due out Tuesday to all affected subscribers. The message indicates the two possible solutions for those who already share their identifiers: they can add an additional subscriber by paying the supplement, or transfer the profile of someone outside the household. This one will have to subscribe to its own subscription but will thus preserve its preferences. The Californian group also recalls that subscribers continue to be able to watch their programs when they are on the move.
Netflix, which has more than 232 million subscribers, added a cheaper subscription with advertising in late 2022, after years of reluctance. It now has nearly 5 million monthly active users, according to the company. The password sharing restriction policy was lagging behind. But testing and deployment in Latin America and more recently in Canada have been successful, according to Greg Peters, the company’s co-CEO.
“At first there were cancellations. And then people who were using borrowed credentials create their own accounts and add profiles, and we regain traction in terms of subscriptions and revenue,” he told an analyst call in April.
