Are you the one whose sibling living in London or Europe shares your Netflix subscriptions? Well, that joy may be curtailed soon if an experiment Netflix is undertaking turns out to be successful.
“If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching”, was the notification displayed for some users last year, according to news reports.
In the coming weeks, Netflix will begin offering subscribers in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru the option to add as many as two people to "sub-accounts" at a monthly fee of $2 to $3, Netflix product innovation director Chengyi Long explained.
"We recognize that people have many entertainment choices, so we want to ensure any new features are flexible and useful for members, whose subscriptions fund all our great TV and films," Long said in a blog post, AFP said.
Netflix said that features like separate profiles and multiple streams in top-end plans have confused people as to how and when Netflix accounts can be shared.
Netflix is planning to explore an additional security layer to block access to those whose locations are not the same as those of account holders. It is testing charging a fee to subscribers who share their accounts with people who don't live in their homes, according to a report in Hindustan Times.
The reason for Netflix carrying out this experiment is because its Q4 results have taken a beating.
In Q4 2021, Netflix added 8.28 million paid subscribers globally compared to 8.5 million in the same period a year before. The forecast is for 2.5 million new subscribers in the first three months of 2022. It will be lesser than the 3.98 million added during the same period in 2021.
According to research by Magid in late 2020, around 33 percent of all Netflix users share their passwords with at least one more user outside the household. The sample size for the survey was 2,235 globally.
Netflix said it will allow people already sharing accounts to transfer profile and viewing history information to new sub-accounts.
Long said the company will study the utility of the new model in the three countries before making changes anywhere else.
(With inputs from AFP)
