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.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 25 2023, @02:29PM
Yeah, I forgot about that ad tier of Netflix, did they raise my ad-free rate 40% like D+ did? I try not to get too worked up about little stuff I can't change anyway.
>Netflix is also killing their DVD rentals, which is kind of sad, but we canceled our DVD plan recently. So, I don't have any skin in that game anymore, anyway.
Yeah, we held on to DVD rentals until maybe 10-12 years ago when the streaming content picked up to a point that there's enough time to be wasted on it that we don't need to waste any more time with a wider selection available on DVD. The other thing that really sucked about that time was that, in the beginning, you could get just about ANYTHING (within reason) as a DVD rental on Netflix, but after streaming started with it's little steaming pile of not-so-great content, they also cut back on the selection in the DVD catalog, little by little, until eventually I just said: "what's the point?"
My 19 year old son told us that he wanted D+, so he gets it, under his name, paid by him, but (shhhh.... don't tell Disney) we also watch it as a family together in addition to what he streams for himself alone. When they price-hiked for the ad-free option, I would have dropped them if it was for me, but it's not, so we still have it.
I'm sorry to hear that you're addicted to Prime, they also got my 19 year old but luckily we were able to council him about cost-benefit ratios and the wallet draining effects of suggestive sell techniques before his free month expired.
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