An account is for one household only, the streaming service has declared in a crackdown on rules
British users of Netflix will be charged an extra £4.99 if they want to continue to share passwords with people outside their households.
The streaming company has written to millions of subscribers it believes are sharing accounts, warning them that “a Netflix account is for use by one household”.
The company has for years turned a blind eye to password sharing — in March 2017 it tweeted that “love is sharing a password” — but with stalling subscriber growth it has now decided to try and stamp it out.
In the email the company said: “Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with – your household.” A single account can host up to five profiles, each individually named and curated for a particular person, but these must be for people who live in the same dwelling.
It has now asked subscribers to sign out of devices that shouldn’t have access and then either transfer profiles to new accounts or add an extra member for £4.99.
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That fee is the same as Netflix’s cheapest tariff, which has adverts, but is cheaper than the basic advert-free package of £6.99 a month.
The change was first announced in 2021 but has been rolled out to more than 100 countries after being trialled in Latin America, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal and Canada.
Netflix’s co-chief executive, Greg Peters, said: “This will not be a universally popular move.”
The company has experienced a backlash in some countries. Netflix lost a million subscribers in Spain when it started charging €5.99 for additional accounts. However the company says that in Canada, where the changes were introduced in February, the paid membership base is now larger.
Netflix has said it will use IP addresses (a unique identifier for a device when it connects to the internet), device IDs and account activity to spot non-household sharing.
If it believes a device is breaking the rules a one-time code will be sent to the account’s registered phone number or email address and the user will have 15 minutes to enter the code or be locked out.
Going abroad for a short period of time might not trigger the verification but a longer trip could do so. It is not clear how using a virtual private network (VPN) will affect the changes.
A VPN allows a user to obscure their true IP address and Netflix allows users to use them to view content that is available worldwide.
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Netflix is facing increased competition from other streamers such as Disney, and its customers have been hit by global inflation rises.
The company’s share of the market is set to reduce from 55 per cent to 49 per cent by 2028, according to Enders Analysis, a subscription research service.
Netflix has 233 million paying subscribers around the world. It has previously estimated that about 100 million homes share passwords.
Barclays has estimated that Netflix could increase its revenue by 10 per cent if it could convert at least 35 per cent to 40 per cent of freeloading homes into paying subscriptions.
Last year the Intellectual Property Office suggested that unauthorised password sharing could be a breach of copyright.
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