Netflix has a new idea to get you to pay extra for sharing your account
Netflix is not at its peak right now. While it has hadrecent hits, like the recent fourth season ofStranger Things, the platform sufferedits first drop in subscribers in recent memory not too long ago. As a result, the company’s looking to recoup and get any money it might miss out on. Netflix believes a significant source of that is people using shared logins. Earlier this year, the company beganexperimenting with “sub accounts"as a way to ensure it can charge for extra users, but Netflix is also looking into other ideas.
Now, Netflixhas announcedanother way it could implement paid sharing. Instead of using sub accounts, this new scheme would allow your account to be used at another household for a flat fee. Anyone in that household can then use Netflix as part of that charge.
Testing on this idea will begin next month in Argentina, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. These are all Latin American countries where password sharing is common. You’ll need to pay an extra $2.99 per month if you want to share your login with a friend, except if you’re in Argentina, where it costs 219 pesos (anywhere between $0.75 and $1.70 since Argentinian exchange rates are complicated). It’s unclear how long this experiment will run for, and how Netflix will implement this idea in the US. The initial sub accounts experiment rolled out in Peru, Chile, and Costa Rica.
There are limits on how many extra homes you can add to your account, depending on your plan. If you’re on the Basic plan, you’ll only be able to add one extra home, while Standard gets two and Premium gets three.
Both sub accounts and home-sharing are experiments, and Netflix is probably seeing which one works better before eventually settling on one single solution for everyone. In order for Netflix to actually be able to get people to use this, though, it’ll need to actually start enforcing it. It doesn’t seem to bedoing a great job right now, though.
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