Early in the year, Netflix reported their first quarterly subscriber loss in a decade. This was soon followed by plans to crack down on those sharing their passwords with people outside their households, with the aim of converting the beneficiaries into paying customers.
How Netflix would go about converting the password borrowers so to speak into paying customers was not exactly clear, however, during the company’s earnings quarterly call on Tuesday, Netflix’s top bosses shed light upon how they will go about this.
There is currently a pilot program running in Latin America which charges extra fees for “extra user” subaccounts. These are users outside your immediate household who use your login to access the service. Netflix plans to expand this pilot program to the rest of the world in early 2023.
“We’ve landed on a thoughtful approach to monetizing account sharing, and we’ll begin rolling this out more broadly starting in early 2023,” explains one of Netflix’s bosses
To determine whether you are in different locations, Netflix will scan users’ devices and their account activity to ascertain whether their logins are being used in different places. IP addresses, device IDs and account activity are some of the things the company will be checking. Once identified, you will then be required to pay an additional $2.99(Ksh 360) for each new location that your account is logged in from.
Netflix will make an exception if you are travelling and log in from a different location. However, they add that they will only allow this once a year.
If you were sharing an account with someone else and would like to have your own account for one reason or another, such as after a breakup with an ex. Netflix has made it possible to transfer your Netflix profile to the new account, carrying over your watch history, saved titles, subtitle appearance and other settings intact.
“After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create sub-accounts (‘extra member’) if they want to pay for family or friends,” adds Netflix
Finally, the company has also announced a less expensive ad-supported tier that will cost $7(Ksh 850) a month when it launches on 3rd November. This new tier will be first rolled out in 12 countries, including the UK, Canada, and Mexico, by November 10th with the rest of the world to follow if it is successful in the aforementioned markets.
