Netflix restricts password sharing in more than 100 countries – Liberation

Netflix wants your money. It had been announced then denied, then it comes back. Netflix announced on Tuesday that users in the United States, France and around 100 other countries will now have to pay extra to share their access codes to the service with people outside their household, as part of its strategy to diversify their income. 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.

“More than 100 million households share their account, which affects our ability to invest in great movies and TV series”, Netflix pointed out in February in a press release. Prices vary by country: American 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. The price will be 4 euros in Portugal, a country where the measure has already been introduced.

“Your Netflix account is for you and for the people who live with you, i.e. your household”, explains an email from the platform which must be sent Tuesday to all the subscribers concerned. 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 a person 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 are 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 assured at a conference with analysts in April.