If you depend on using your friends’ accounts to watch movies and series on the “Netflix” platform, you may soon have to pay your own subscription, after the network announced its plans to charge additional fees to basic subscribers, in order to allow sharing accounts with anyone. outside their homes, as part of its ongoing campaign to crack down on password sharing.

"Netflix has always made it easy for people who live together to share their accounts, through features including separate profiles, and although these features are hugely popular, they have caused the Also in some confusion", regarding how to share accounts.

Therefore, the network decided to make changes to the features that allow sharing accounts outside the family, saying that it “affects its ability to invest in great new series and movies for its members.”

Two new features

"Since last year, we have been working towards finding ways to enable members who share accounts outside of their families to do so easily and securely, by paying more money," Long added.

Over the next few weeks, the platform will launch and test two new features for its members in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru. The first is to enable members to add sub-accounts for up to two people they don't live with, each with their own profile, personal recommendations, and password.

In addition to paying an additional fee on top of the basic subscription, this fee is estimated at $2.96 in Chile, $2.99 ​​in Costa Rica, and $2.09 in Peru, which is less than the cost of opening a separate account.

The second feature is to enable subscribers to allow people who share their accounts to transfer their profile information to either a new account, or a sub-account within the subscriber's account, and this feature will inspire those people to create their own account.

Long stressed the platform's keenness to make "any new features flexible and useful to members, whose subscriptions fund all our great series and movies," and stressed that work will be done to understand the impact of these two features on members in these three countries before making changes elsewhere. In the world.

Netflix's new measures are part of its ongoing campaign to eliminate the sharing of passwords (pixels).

Constant attempts

Netflix has turned a blind eye to the behavior of its users sharing their accounts over the years, even in 2016 saying it was okay for users to share their passwords as long as they didn't sell them.

But in recent years, the platform has taken greater action against this practice, stating in terms of its use that "the Netflix service and any content accessed through our service ... may not be shared with individuals outside of your household."

In March 2021, Netflix forced some users to prove ownership of the accounts they were using, as a way to push those who rely on other people's accounts to pay and create their own.

The move to block account sharing is part of Netflix's strategy, which indicates that it is looking to increase revenue from its existing customers, rather than new subscribers.

And last January, the platform announced that it would raise the price of its subscription in the United States of America from $14 to $15.50, the second increase in its subscription prices in two years.

Netflix has the most popular so far among the new streaming platforms that have debuted over the past few years, but at the beginning of this year, it said it expected only 2.5 million new subscribers to join it in the first quarter of 2022, the smallest increase in years.

According to an analysis by the research firm Parks Associates, password sharing and hacking cost streaming platforms $9.1 billion in 2019 alone, and the company estimates that this number will rise to $12.5 billion by 2024.