Whether you’re sharing an account with a friend, family member or a random Netflix password you’ve acquired pay attention.
We’ve seen it before, but it’s never really come to fruition, however, Netflix is looking for a way to deter account sharing.
In a blog post written by Chengyi Long Director, Product Innovation said:
We’ve always made it easy for people who live together to share their Netflix account, with features like separate profiles and multiple streams in our Standard and Premium plans. While these have been hugely popular, they have also created some confusion about when and how Netflix can be shared. As a result, accounts are being shared between households – impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.
The answer is, to have a way to share accounts outside of your household. So Netflix will be testing “subaccounts” that can be added to your account — at a cost — or to move profiles to a new account. It’s not time to panic though, because it’s only a test in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru at this time.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear indication as to how Netflix intends to identify accounts that are being shared outside of a single household. It’s likely though, that it will be some extension of the 2FA set-up they’ve been using for prompts on the primary account holder’s device.
I suspect that they are planning a “Family” account for only a “small” $7 plus fee.