Netflix is stepping up its efforts to make free viewers pay: Starting early next year, it will start charging accounts for sharing passwords, instituting a system that adds fees for “additional member” sub-accounts “when people outside a household use the subscription.
The company did not specify the price of these new fees when it confirmed the plan last week. But this change is already being tested in a few Latin American countries, where Netflix charges a fee for each additional member that’s around a quarter of the price of a Standard plan.
If Netflix sticks to this practice, each additional member sub-account in the United States would cost around $3.50 to $4 or even up to $4.43, depending on the level of fees in Chile.
And if it meets the standards of these account sharing tests, Netflix is also likely to make these “additional member” fees available only on its $15.50 per month Standard and $20 per month Premium plans, which both allow more than one simultaneous stream.
Netflix didn’t offer an option for these “additional member” fees on its basic plans in testing. Netflix’s Basic $10 per month tier and a new plan coming next month – Basic at $7 per month with ads – both limit your viewing to a single concurrent stream, making account sharing functionally difficult. .
Netflix hasn’t said how it will enforce unpaid password sharing once the fee is widely rolled out.
After years of being relatively laissez-faire about password sharing, Netflix began testing ways to “monetize account sharing” after it suffered its biggest-ever subscriber losses earlier this year. In addition to password sharing fees, Netflix plans to launch cheaper ad-supported subscriptions next month.
Netflix’s dominance in video streaming — not to mention years of uninterrupted subscriber growth — has caused nearly every major Hollywood media company to funnel billions of dollars into their own streaming operations. These so-called streaming wars have sparked a wave of new services, including Disney Plus, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount Plus, and Apple TV Plus. This flood of streaming options has complicated the number of services you have to use (and, often, pay for) to watch your favorite shows and movies online.
Now, feeling the heat of intensifying competition to hold your attention and your subscription, Netflix is pursuing strategies it had rejected for years.
The password-sharing fee system Netflix will roll out appears to be modeled after a system it has been testing in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru for about six months.
The day before revealing its plans for a wider rollout of these account sharing fees, Netflix announced the announcement by launching a profile transfer feature, which is a key part of the password sharing fees being tested in Chile. , Costa Rica and Peru. This feature allows a profile created on a shared Netflix account to transfer its watch history and recommendations to a new independent account. This new account can then be added to someone else’s Standard or Premium subscription plan as an additional member, or they can sign up for their own subscription.
In July, Netflix announced that it would test a different method in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. This test established an account’s primary residence as the “domicile” for membership. If the service detects streaming in additional homes for more than two weeks, it prompts the account to set up – and pay for – additional “homes”, with a limit on the number of additional homes you can add based on how much you already pay for Netflix. Netflix seems to be avoiding this model in favor of the other it has tested.
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