The end of password sharing is coming to Netflix in early 2023, affecting more than 100 million Netflix viewers who currently watch the service using borrowed passwords.
Sarah Krouse and Jessica Toonkel for The Wall Street Journal:
The company has put off this moment for years. Researchers inside Netflix Inc. identified password sharing as a major problem eating into subscriptions in 2019, people familiar with the situation say, but the company was worried about how to address it without alienating consumers. Then Covid lockdowns hit, bringing a wave of new subscribers, and the effort to scrutinize sharing petered out.
Netflix didn’t pursue a plan to crack down widely on the practice until this year, as subscriber losses mounted. At a company gathering outside Los Angeles early this year, Co-Chief Executive Reed Hastings told senior executives that the pandemic boom had masked the extent of the password-sharing issue, and that they had waited too long to deal with it, according to people who were at the meeting.
More than 100 million Netflix viewers now watch the service using passwords they borrow—often from family members or friends, the company says. Netflix has said that it will put an end to that arrangement starting in 2023, asking people who share accounts to pay to do so. The company expects to begin rolling out the change in the U.S. early in the year… The company has said it would enforce its rules based on IP addresses, device IDs and account activity.
MacDailyNews Take: Asking 100 million freeloaders to pay for a service they are using? Prepare for massive amounts of unjustified outrage. Chances are high that Netflix will capitulate to said unjustified outrage – and the resulting subscription cancelations – with 60 days of bearing the brunt.
FYI: Netflix provides a dashboard for primary account owners that displays which devices are logged in at any given time. Primary account owners can use this dashboard to spot unusual sign ins and sign out anyone who shouldn’t have access.
After signing into Netflix on the web or the mobile app, navigate to account settings. Under Security & Privacy, choose “Manage access and devices.” There you’ll see all recently active devices, each device’s location, the selected profile, and a “Sign Out” button for each.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
Save Netflix the pain, really, just leave it.
Seriously 100 million people are sharing? And they think all those people are just going to sign up?
Sounds to me like there’ll be a lot of people heading to the high seas
The only reason I still have Netflix is that my mother (retired, lives in different state) uses my account. This new policy will just incentivize people like me to cancel . . . I’m sure Netflix has some “metric” for people like me, but they may be surprised, that when people are forced to choose, they will choose to not have Netflix.
I don’t understand how this is supposed to be implemented. I’m paying to have Netflix on 4 screens simultaneously. How do all the users in my household log in when password sharing is eliminated?