After months of different warnings and announcements from the streaming giant, Netflix announced that it would be terminating one of its most beloved features this upcoming spring, password sharing. The company announced last month during the streaming platform’s four-quarter 2022 earnings salary report that a new verification system was coming to the streaming service.
On Jan. 19, newly elected CEO Greg Peters spoke about Netflix’s plan to curb password sharing between users, “[Some password sharers] could pay, but they don’t need to, and so they’re borrowing somebody’s account,” he continued. “And so our job is to give them a little bit of a nudge and to create features that make transitioning to their own account easy and simple.”
Netflix will employ these changes to the streaming platform to crack down on password sharing by using subscription identification tracking technology. They do this by gathering a user’s watching habits, IP addresses, and other personal data users provide when they sign into their account. This information was leaked when a document was accidentally posted online by the streaming platform and then later deleted, yet, the damage had already been done as news swirled around multiple news sites and media platforms. Understandably, Netflix users and account holders are angered by these announcements, discovering that these new policy changes will be implemented by the end of March this year.
Peters and the rest of the board at Netflix are encouraging “password sharers” to convert and make the standard plan of a $9.99 monthly payment in order for them to access the streaming service; however, it is more than likely that Netflix will include cheaper subscription options to incentivize new membership. That will give password sharers who decide to sign up for their own account access to viewing history and their personalized viewing recommendations as well. The changes were made, as Peters puts it, “to sort of monetize the viewing value that we’re delivering.”
Peters says that password borrowers will be encouraged to make accounts and go the extra mile. That will give password-sharers who decide to sign up for their own account access to their viewing history and their personalized viewing recommendations as well.
While there is still more information coming out on the new policy changes, the changes announced to users are blunt but straight to the point: Users can no longer share their log-in information with people outside of their household, which means friends and family; Users will be asked to verify their account with a four-digit-code sent to them over email; Lastly, when users leave their home and wish to watch Netflix on a mobile device, they have to request a temporary password to unblock access to their account.
This password crackdown that Netflix plans to enforce is going to affect families who share passwords with their kids or families who have kids that are off at college. With the new policy changes, the company’s terms of use require people to live in the same location in order to share passwords across devices. If parents want to give their children who are away at school access to the Netflix account, the streaming platform supposedly won’t ”automatically charge” them, but you will eventually be charged an extra fee if Netflix detects that someone outside the household is using the account.
What the streaming service doesn’t recognize is that the consequences of their new policy changes are already causing pushback from a majority of their subscriber base. Netflix still hasn’t given a full explanation of what these changes will mean for people who travel for work, college students, or people who have homes in different areas of the country.
What’s the most ironic part of the whole situation is when Netflix does make the new policy changes in March, it will be the 6-year anniversary of when they posted this tweet back in March of 2017.