It's official: Netflix will start charging you for sharing your password with someone outside of your immediate household.
The streamer has already begun to charge users in parts of Central and South America for password sharing. Now it has confirmed plans to roll out the change globally in the first half of 2023 when its slate of new and returning shows includes the Penn Badgley-led psychological thriller You.
"While our terms of use limit use of Netflix to a household, we recognise this is a change for members who share their account more broadly," the company said in an earnings letter this week, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
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Netflix's co-CEO Greg Peters said the aim is to clamp down on "what we call casual sharing, which is [when] people could pay, but they don’t need to and so they’re borrowing somebody’s account."
He added: "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."
In December, the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) said that password sharing is technically illegal because it breaches copyright law. However, this is an isolated statement and statements haven't been made about this matter globally. Netflix has also never shown any intention of taking legal action against users who share their passwords.
Instead, the streamer will give users the option to pay an extra monthly charge for the ability to continue sharing their account with friends or family outside of their household. The company has yet to announce how much this charge will be, but a figure of $5 or less seems likely since the price hike appears to be $2.99 USD in the US.
In recent months, Netflix has also encouraged users to set up their own individual subscriptions by giving users the ability to boot their ex out of their account and launching a new cheaper plan with ads.
According to recent figures, Netflix has around 6.3 million subscribers in Australia as of 2022.
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