Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: Netflix said it was limiting password sharing in New Zealand, Canada, Portugal and Spain.
Customers in those countries will be charged an additional fee if they want to share their subscriptions with friends and family who do not live with them.
The move follows a crackdown on password sharing in South America and will be implemented in the UK by the end of March. Netflix estimates that 100 million people worldwide use shared accounts.
Netflix revenue loss due to shared accounts
According to the company, the revenue loss from shared accounts affected Netflix’s ability to invest in new programming content. It has stated that it intends to expand the new approach to more countries in the coming months.
It said in a blog post on Wednesday that over the last year, we’ve been starting to explore various approaches to address this issue in Latin America, and we’re now prepared to roll them out more broadly in the coming months, beginning today in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain.
Until now, subscribers could quickly share their login and password with friends outside their home. When Netflix tweeted, “Love is sharing a password,” in 2017, it appeared to endorse the practice. However, rising competition in the streaming market and customers cutting back on subscriptions due to rising living costs have prompted Netflix to prioritise revenue growth.
According to the company, allowing accounts to be used by multiple people within households has “created confusion” about when and how people can share. According to the company, members in Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal will now be asked to set up a “primary location” for their account and manage who has access to it.
It said that members would still be able to watch Netflix while travelling, both on personal devices and by logging in from other locations, such as a hotel. Canadian subscribers can add an extra member as a “sub-account” for CAD$7.99 (£4.92), with a maximum of two sub-accounts per subscription.
In New Zealand, the fee would be NZ$7.99 (£4.17). Subaccounts in Portugal would cost €3.99 (£3.54), while subaccounts in Spain would cost €5.99 (£5.32). Netflix CEO Gregory Peters acknowledged last month that the adjustments would not be “universally popular” and warned investors to expect some shutdowns.
He stated that the company expected to make up those losses eventually. Netflix’s subscriber numbers fell dramatically in the first half of 2022. To cover rising costs, it cut hundreds of jobs and raised prices.
However, in the last three months of 2022, the company saw a larger-than-expected increase in user numbers, up 7.66 million, bringing its total paid subscribers worldwide to nearly 231 million.
In November, it launched a lower-cost ad-supported option in 12 countries, including most of Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
