We knew this day would come sooner or later. After we Spaniards were unwitting testers of Netflix’s measures to limit the possibility of sharing passwords with other people, these limitations are now coming to the United States, one of the main markets of the streaming platform.
Although Netflix had planned to implement this measure in the first quarter of the year, the huge number of unsubscribes the company suffered in Spain and other markets where password sharing was already limited ended up delaying everything until early summer.
This week, thousands of U.S. users are receiving Netflix’s first-ever notice “encouraging” them to set a primary location. U.S. users who sign in on a device located elsewhere will have to pay $7.99 per month to continue using Netflix on that account.
“Netflix accounts are designed to be used in the same household,” the company states in its ad. “Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are – at home, on the road, on vacation – and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices.”
As in Spain and other markets where Netflix has already implemented the measure, users in the United States have the possibility of transferring their profiles to their own accounts, should they decide to stop sharing accounts through this new system. In this way, users can keep their playback history and favorite series listings, among other data.
In addition to the United States, Netflix’s new measures to limit password sharing will also be implemented in other markets in the coming weeks, such as Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.
If we add to this fact that the Netflix subscription plan with advertising is a success and already has more than 5 million users worldwide, we could almost completely rule out that Netflix will end up backtracking (at least in the short term) and we can go back to sharing passwords as in the past.
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