You’d probably be hard-pressed to find someone who isn’t sharing at least one streaming account with family or friends. For consumers, it’s a great thing because we’re saving money. For the businesses such as Disney Plus, Stan, Amazon Prime and Netflix this costs them a lot of money. So it stands to reason that they will continually work towards ensuring that they maximise their income by forcing users to have their own accounts.

In March we saw the first signs that Netflix was getting ready to clamp down on account sharing. Now we’re hearing that Australian users are getting prompts about living with the account owner or getting their own account.

One of our readers who, astoundingly is the account holder, messaged me about the previous article and that he received a notification. The process was quick and relatively painless for the primary account holder:

  1. The option to receive an email or text was given: He selected text
  2. The registered mobile, which is his, then received a code which he entered
  3. He continued watching

At the moment it appears to be a minor inconvenience if you’re the account holder and (provided you know them) an annoyance if you’re not. But given the readiness so many people have to share accounts, it’s possible your account has been shared far and wide so is a password change and 2FA really a bad thing?

Thanks to Michael for the tip.

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Elvin

Good. Catch the bastards that are doing this and making it more expensive for the rest of us.

JeniSkunk

I hope this corpor-rat witch hunt ends up seriously costing the streaming services both users and cash.

Snoozin

I suppose if you share the accounts then Netflix seeing different ISP IP addresses would alert them to account sharing happening.
I don’t blame them cracking down. Even though there is ways around it.

Paul Warner

Wonder they would do if you use a DNS service to access content from the UK or US??

Last edited 2 years ago by Paul Warner
Will

Create a mail rule/Tasker SMS forward task to push the Netflix 2FA codes to other person. Problem solved.

Chris

For power users sure, don’t think a normal person would be keen to set this up and they’d have to do it manually every time. It’s a cat and mouse game, they’ll keep trying to make it more and more inconvenient to the point where it’s easier to just get separate accounts