The Netflix streaming platform published a new page on Tuesday on their dedicated customer support site. Inside, he announced the new measures to limit as much as possible the possibility of sharing an account between people who do not live in the same house. The page, which referred to people subscribing in the United States, was removed after a couple of days, suggesting some indecision as to how it intends to block this practice.
According to Netflix, around 100 million users worldwide use the service with someone else’s login credentials. According to the announcement, from the end of March it will be possible to share the account only between the cohabitants of the person who pays for the profile: Netflix intends to check that the devices linked to an account – mobile phones, tablets, computers or smart TVs – connect at least once once every 31 days from the IP address of the wi-fi router with which the person to whom the account belongs connects to use the platform (a criterion which, taken literally, could still allow the rule of coexistence to be circumvented).
Netflix has been struggling to continue growing in recent years due to the huge increase in competition from other quality streaming services, and thinks that putting an end to the widespread practice of account sharing is the only way to get new subscribers; especially in North America, where the market is more saturated with alternatives and almost all the people who are willing to pay for Netflix’s service are already paying for it.
The practice of sharing your account password with friends, relatives and partners you don’t live with, however, is very ingrained among those who use the service, and the announcement has attracted a lot of criticism. Thus, Netflix quickly deleted the e page he told the tech outlet The Verge which has not yet decided how to move regarding its registered users in the United States.
Based on the contents of the deleted page, the intention was to block access to the account for devices that at the end of the 31 days had never connected from the primary location, i.e. from the home of the person paying the subscription, forcing them to create a new account – and pay for it – to finish the movie or series they were watching, and offering the possibility to keep suggestions, history of series and movies already watched or saved and other settings.
“These measures represent a reasonable first step to avoid a massive exodus of account-sharing users,” the deleted page said. “If they don’t meet Netflix’s expectations of curbing password sharing, tougher measures could follow, such as charging extra for users who keep giving their credentials to other people. Netflix has begun testing methods to charge users three dollars when someone outside their household logs into their account in several Latin American countries in 2022,” it read.
