Buoyed by the 5.9 million new subscribers it gained in the second quarter of the year courtesy of the implementation of its strict password-sharing policy in some key markets like the United States, streaming service Netflix has extended its crackdown on password-sharing to the entire world.
For those of us in Kenya, today marked the first day that we came face-to-face with the new limitation to who we could share our Netflix password with.
Netflix users in Kenya have received notifications via email and prompts on the Netflix apps on their devices (smart TVs running Android TV and other operating systems, streaming boxes running Android TV and other OSs, game consoles that have the app installed, mobile devices, PCs, etc) of the new password-sharing regime, requiring them to confirm that the said devices are part of their household.
Upon confirmation, any devices signed into using the specified Netflix account on the same network will be deemed to belong to a particular household and, thereby, get a free pass to Netflix’s expansive content catalogue that gets refreshed every month.
Those signing into Netflix accounts with credentials that belong to someone else at a location that won’t be deemed by the system to be where the household is located will automatically be locked out from doing so unless the primary account owner opts to pay for them or, as is likely to be the case for many, those particular users choose to pay for their own Netflix accounts.
Netflix is offering people who have been sharing accounts and have their own profiles setup to migrate to their own paid accounts while keeping all their viewing history, lists and other preferences.
Netflix defines a household as people living under the same roof. The easiest determinant of this is devices being on the same network. When one goes ahead with the standard automatic Netflix household check, devices that are connected to the same network and are active will automatically added to the same household.
Netflix has previously said that over 100 million households around the world are beneficiaries of password-sharing from the company’s 238.4 million paying subscribers.
“Over the last 15 years, we’ve worked hard to build a streaming service that’s easy to use, including for people who travel or live together. It’s great that our members love Netflix movies and TV shows so much they want to share them more broadly. But today’s widespread account sharing between households undermines our long term ability to invest in and improve our service,” Netflix’s Director of Innovation, Chengyi Long, said last year as the company shared an update on its password-sharing crackdown experimentation.
Back then, the company had trialled an “add a home” feature on the service in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Later the company topped that feature with another that allowed users in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru to “add an extra member” to their accounts. These experiments were refined to what Netflix rolled out to users in the US and other countries in May and what it has now rolled out to everyone.
