Netflix has started its crackdown on subscribers who give their friends and families living elsewhere their passwords to watch programmes on their Netflix accounts.
Starting from Tuesday, the video on-demand service provider started sending the email below to members who are sharing Netflix outside their household in the United States and United Kingdom. Netflix is now offering this subscriber the option to add 1 extra member who doesn’t live with them.
So if you have the Netflix Standard plan that costs $15.49 per month, adding one extra member outside your household will cost you $7.99 extra each month.
However subscribers on Netflix’s 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 extra members to their account at all.
Netflix used to be pro-password sharing. In fact, in March 2017, it famously tweeted, “Love is sharing a password.”
However it has realised that this love was at the company’s expense. It found out over time that it was customer growth was declining despite its huge annual investments. As at 2021, it started considering clamping down on password sharing. It was reported that as at that time, about 33% of all Netflix users shared their password with at least one other person.
In March 2022, the crackdown started in earnest. The company issued a press release stating that subscribers will now pay to share Netflix outside their households. In April 2022, it revealed that more than 100 million households were getting Netflix through password sharing and the company lost subscribers for the first time in over 10 years.
This is one of the ways the company has implemented to stop the declining growth of subscribers. In November last year, it started rolling out an ad-supported plan also to help with this.
