You may have fewer than ten weeks to share your Netflix login with individuals outside your house before the service begins charging for the privilege.
Netflix hinted at a password-sharing crackdown in July, following its first subscription drop in over a decade—200,000 customers—in the first quarter of 2022.
Netflix in a letter to shareholders on Thursday that it anticipated “spreading out paid sharing more extensively” later in the first quarter. This implies that by the end of March, you might not be able to give your password out for free.
According to Netflix, account sharing impacted over 100 million homes, which “undermines our long-term capacity to invest in and develop Netflix.” While its terms of service previously restricted accounts to a single household, it said, “We acknowledge this is a shift for users who share their account more extensively.”
“As we roll out paid sharing, users in many countries will have the choice to pay more if they want to share Netflix with someone they don’t live with,” according to the shareholder letter.
Subscribers will be able to transfer a user profile to a new account, according to the company.
Paid sharing has previously been tested in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru, where it costs $2 to $3 to add an extra user account for someone who does not live in the same home. Peruvian Netflix users informed the rest of the world that the policy was perplexing and that there had been no enforcement of the regulation.
According to the shareholder letter, numerous Latin American consumers terminated their memberships due to the sharing fee. Netflix also predicted a drop in short-term engagement. According to the report, once customers who borrowed accounts start subscribing themselves, overall income should increase.
The anticipated broadening of the sharing fee follows the November debut of an ad-supported subscription tier, in which subscribers are shown up to five ads each hour. “Basic With Ads” costs $3 less per month than the cheapest ad-free tier, at $7 per month.
Netflix did not reply quickly to a request for comment.
