Netflix
Netflix is clear: account sharing will be over very soon
The streaming platform is about to get very serious after estimating they have about 100 million potential clients.
Netflix has been suffering for months of a subscriber hemorrhage, with millions of users leaving the platform for good, so they have decided to take action before things go really bad. They’ve presented a new subscription tier with ads, although their results aren’t going as expected to the point in which they’ve had to refund money to the advertisers that bet on the platform.
We also knew that Netflix wanted to ban account sharing.Their idea was to charge an extra amount to users that wanted to share their account with someone else, restricting use of an account to a single home or address.
The truth is that Netflix has been pretty easy going about all of this until now. They tested some of their ideas in certain countries to figure out how it would work, but didn’’t do much besides warn users who were found sharing an account. It seemed like the whole ordeal was coming to a close, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Netflix, on the hunt for 100 million possible clients
Right now, the company’s subscriber count goes above 223 million users around the world. The real problem comes from the fact that there’s approximately 100 million additional users that access the service through shared accounts of existing subscribers. This is exactly the market that Netflix wants to get.
While they’ve been letting things be for now, it seems like Netflix is going to begin taking active measures to force users with shared accounts to pay up to enjoy the service.
Netflix has already begun trying this in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru in the beginning of 2022, but as we said before it was in a very lax manner. Now, they’re done playing around: this measure is going in with full force in the United States at the start of 2023.
Users that enter Netflix from an IP address that isn’t the one registered by the subscriber will be prompted to enter a security code to be able to access the service. If they can’t provide it, they won’t be able to watch anything. Netflix will now track your location to figure out what your home IP address is in order to do this, so people who don’t pay an extra fee won’t be able to share their accounts anymore.
As of this moment, the new measures will enter effect in the United States of America, but it’s pretty clear that Europe, Canada, and other territories will follow suit very soon.