Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. Customers in these countries will now be asked to pay an additional fee if they want to allow friends and family who don’t live with them to share their subscription.
According to Netflix, around 100 million people worldwide use shared accounts, which has affected the company’s ability to invest in new programming content. The media giant plans to extend this new approach to more countries in the coming months.
Back in 2017, Netflix appeared to be endorsing password sharing when they tweeted “Love is sharing a password”. However, growing competition in the streaming market and customers reducing their subscriptions due to rising costs have forced the company to focus on securing its revenues.
To solve this issue, members in Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal will now be asked to set up a “primary location” for their account and manage who has access to it. They can still watch Netflix while traveling, both on personal devices and logging in at other places, like a hotel. Subscribers can add an extra member as a “sub-account” for a fee, with a maximum of two sub-accounts per subscription.
Netflix COO, Gregory Peters, recently warned that these changes would not be universally popular and that the company expects to see some cancellations. However, they expect to eventually make up for these losses.
As for India, it’s unclear when these limitations will be introduced. But, with so many people sharing Netflix accounts in the country, it’ll be interesting to see the impact it’ll have. We can only imagine the chaos and confusion it’ll cause, and the jokes that’ll come along with it. After all, in India, sharing is caring, especially when it comes to Netflix.
