Netflix will now enforce restrictions on the sharing of passwords in four further countries, including Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain.
Customers in these countries will have to pay extra if they want to share their membership with friends and family who don’t live in the same house as them.
This decision comes after a crackdown on the sharing of passwords in South American countries.
According to estimates provided by the media conglomerate, 100 million people all around the world use shared accounts.
According to the company, their ability to invest in new programming content was being negatively impacted as a result of the loss of revenue from shared accounts. It has been stated that it intends to spread the new strategy to a greater number of countries in the upcoming months.
In a blog post published on Wednesday, the company said that for the past year, it has been “exploring different ways to deal with this problem in Latin America” and that it is now ready to roll out these ways to a wider audience in the coming months, starting with Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain. It said, “We’ve been trying to solve this problem in Latin America in different ways over the past year.”
Up until this point, it has been simple for subscribers to tell their non-family members and neighbors their login information and password for the website.
In 2017, Netflix even posted a tweet that read, “Love is sharing a password,” which gave the impression that the company condoned the practice.
Netflix has been forced to concentrate on bolstering its earnings as a result of increasing competition in the streaming market as well as customers decreasing the number of subscriptions they purchase due to the rising cost of living.
The company stated that the policy of allowing multiple persons living in the same household to use the same account had “caused confusion” regarding when and how people might share accounts.
It was stated that members whose accounts were located in Canada, New Zealand, Spain, or Portugal would now be required to designate a “principal location” for their accounts and manage the individuals who have access to them.
It was stated that members would still be able to watch Netflix while they traveled, either on their own personal devices or by checking in at other locations, such as a hotel.
According to the blog, Canadian users can add an additional person to their membership as a “sub-account” for a fee of CAD$7.99 (£4.92), with a limit of two sub-accounts per subscription.
In New Zealand, the charge would be the same at NZ$7.99, which is equivalent to £4.17. There is a price differential between Portugal and Spain for sub-accounts, which are priced at €3.99 (£3.54) and €5.99 (£5.32), respectively.
Last month, Gregory Peters, Chief Operating Officer of Netflix, recognized that the upcoming adjustments would not be “universally popular” and advised investors to anticipate some cancellations as a result.
He stated that the company anticipated eventually making up for such losses.
The first half of 2022 witnessed a precipitous drop in the number of subscribers that Netflix had. As a result of growing costs, it raised prices and eliminated hundreds of jobs.
In November, it began offering a cheaper version that was supported by advertisements in twelve countries, including the majority of Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
