It is no secret that Netflix is going through hard times at the minute. Lots of subscribers are abandoning the streaming platform and the Netflix share price has been plummeting. The company is already reacting to this, not least with its plans to introduce a lower-priced Netflix subscription plan. If you were worried, however, that Netflix would also rush to cut off your access to a friend or family member’s Netflix account, there is some good news. For now, at least.
Netflix has been saying for a long time now that it would be cracking down on accounts that are shared across multiple households. Recently, this rhetoric was stepped up a notch with Netflix saying that in Peru, Chile, and Costa Rica it was testing a new plan to add a $2.99 surcharge to accounts that would allow them to share their login details to another account. Now, Tech Radar is reporting that Netflix has said this test won’t be extended to other regions any time soon.
This kind of makes sense too. In our recent report on the ad-supported lower-priced tier that Netflix is looking to introduce we speculated that the time of its release would be the perfect time to start cracking down on password sharers. This would be because all of these people who would be losing access to the streaming platform would have a new and more affordable way to maintain access.
The new surcharge will offer Netflix a way to monetize password sharing but not everybody will want to pay extra for other people to watch their Netflix and requiring another household to send over money to the subscriber each month is a bit of a messy solution.
So, all this means that you will at least be able to keep watching Netflix on somebody else’s account for now. Netflix is trying to speed up its implementation of the new lower-priced tier, but it is still a way off. We’ll likely see movement on this issue at the same time as that comes in. In the meantime, however, you may be interested to know that Netflix is getting serious with its preparations to bring video games to its subscribers.
