Shubham Sawarkar
Netflix has decided to crack down on password sharing globally, following initiatives in several Latin American countries earlier this year.
It will complete this by charging a small fee to the primary account holder for each user who accesses the account but lives in a different household. The additional fee has not yet been disclosed, but if it is similar to the pilot projects, account holders should expect to pay around $3 per month to include up to two people who do not live in their household.
Netflix announced the change during its recent quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, October 18, and stated that it will take effect in early 2023.
If an account holder wants to kindly request that their Netflix guests avoid using their password, they can now migrate their profile and all of its settings to a new account using a migration tool unveiled earlier this week by Netflix.
In July, Netflix’s director of product innovation Chengyi Long highlighted the company’s concern about “widespread” account sharing among households, saying it “undermines our [long-term] ability to invest in and improve our service.”
According to data released on Tuesday, Netflix now has 223 million subscribers worldwide, showing a net addition of 2.4 million users during the July-September quarter.
Netflix will be pleased with the evident turnaround in subscriber numbers after losing 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter and nearly one million in the second — and forecasting 4.5 million new subscribers for the current quarter.
Even so, after the results were released, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings expressed his delight, saying, “Thank God we’re done with shrinking quarters.”
Netflix recently announced an ad-supported tier that will cost $7 per month, $3 less than its ad-free Basic tier. Basic with Ads, which has some limitations, begins on November 3.
Disney+, one of Netflix’s main competitors, will also launch an ad-supported tier on December 8 for $8 per month.
