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posted by hubie on Thursday May 25 2023, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the cut-the-other-cord dept.

Starting now, anyone borrowing a Netflix login in the U.S. will have to get their own account or pay $7.99 a month:

After nearly a year of warnings and testing, Netflix has finally launched its password-sharing crackdown in the United States.

Anyone sharing their Netflix account login with family members or friends who don't live at the same address will be asked to pay an extra $7.99 a month for each additional person. The company started sending out emails Tuesday to people it determined are breaking the rules, and will continue to roll them out to primary account holders in the coming days. The people borrowing the login will get an update when they try to log in that tells them how to start their own account.

People who are using an account on the go will need to login from the primarily address once every 31 days to avoid being flagged.

[...] Netflix has said that 100 million people around the world use its subscription streaming service without paying for their own accounts. It started testing this crackdown on password sharing last year in other countries, but has long said it would eventually come to the U.S., where the company was founded in 1997.

[...] While the company policies have always said accounts were meant to be shared by households, it publicly embraced the practice in the past. In 2017, the official Netflix account tweeted "Love is sharing a password." And at CES in 2016, Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings said the company "loved" that people share Netflix accounts and described it as "a positive thing, not a negative thing," according to CNET.

Streaming companies have been tweaking their businesses over the past year as they struggle with increasing competition and the reality that people can only afford so many monthly subscription fees. Many have raised prices, including Prime Video, Netflix and Apple TV Plus, but no other company has gone after account sharing in the same way.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 25 2023, @10:35AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 25 2023, @10:35AM (#1308085)

    I'm sure this already exists, for some tiny number of fringe users.

    Adobe Flash player (RIP and good riddance) constantly issued updates. Those updates were nothing about video playing quality or hardware acceleration compatibility, they were about whack-a-mole piracy hampering.

    Netflix may have a harder time updating all the smart TV and similar players they have fielded, but I bet they do have a department devoted to piracy detection and interdiction.

    The thing is: viewable content can never be fully protected from screen capture, worldwide distribution and replay. All they can do is provide a more convenient way for paying subscribers to access the content. Unlike DRM in the music industry, Netflix seems to understand this.

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