Netflix is about to remove your best friend from your account — unless you pay them to share your account, that is. On Tuesday, Netflix revealed details of how the password-sharing crackdown will affect US viewers and how much it will cost to keep more people on your account.
If you have a Netflix Standard plan that costs $15.49 per month, then you have the option to add an additional member who can use the service outside of your home for $7.99 more per month. Anyone paying for the Netflix Premium package with 4K streaming has the option to add up to two additional members, but each will cost an additional $7.99. Netflix subscribers to its two cheapest plans (Basic or Standard with Ads, which cost $9.99 and $6.99 per month, respectively) do not have the option to add more members to their account.
US Netflix subscribers who share the service “outside their home” will receive this email from the company starting Tuesday, according to the blog post.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24676608/en_US.png)
Image: Netflix
Your Netflix home, according to the company, is determined based on where you watch Netflix on a TV and which IP address the device uses. That location can be reset using the app on a TV or a device connected to a TV, and choose to confirm or update your home, and respond to a verification link sent to listed email address or phone number on the account.
Netflix:
We use information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether the device signed into your account is part of your Netflix Household.
We do not collect GPS data to attempt to determine the precise physical location of your devices.
If a Netflix Household isn’t already set up, we’ll automatically set one up for you based on IP address, device ID, and account activity.
You can always update your Netflix Household from a TV by connecting to your internet and following the steps above.
A support page explaining the new setup describes “additional members” as someone with their own password and profile, paid by the person who “invited” them to join. Additional member accounts have their own set of restrictions. They must be activated in the same country, they can only view or download content on one device at a time, and they cannot create additional profiles or log in as a Kids profile .
Netflix used to be pro-password sharing — famously tweeting “Love is password sharing” in March 2017. (That tweet, as of this writing, still there.) But in early 2022, it began testing ways to end the practice and pay people for accounts using Netflix outside the account owner’s home.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24676624/Screenshot_2023_05_23_at_11.27.38_AM.png)
Image: Netflix
In April 2022, the company revealed that it lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade, and said that at the time more than 100 million households had access to Netflix through password sharing. While trying to restore subscriber growth, cracking down on password sharing is just one of the many levers the company has pulled. (It also introduced an ad plan, which has almost 5 million global active users and has recently been upgraded, and invests heavily in games as an added benefit for subscribers. )
Netflix’s paid password-sharing experiments have been going on for a while, and it expanded the tests to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain in February. The crackdown on password sharing was originally supposed to happen in the US in late Q1, but the company pushed it to Q2 in April.
