In Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic, Netflix is piloting a new strategy to combat password sharing (as reported first by Bloomberg). According to a support website for Netflix in Honduras, if customers use their accounts in a place other than their permanent residence for more than two weeks, they will be prompted to pay an extra cost. In Argentina, each additional residence will cost an additional 219 pesos ($1.17) each month, and $2.99 elsewhere.
Netflix claims that in the test regions, member accounts have a single primary “home” where they can access Netflix across all devices used in the home as well as travel and use Netflix on laptops and mobile devices when away from home without taking additional steps. Users will have the option to purchase extra “homes” for the test, which they may choose to add or remove in order to use the service on TV displays.
According to Netflix, you can use the service for up to two weeks when “traveling” on a TV outside of your house without paying an additional fee, “as long as your account has not been utilized in that location before. This is permitted just once a year per area.
In these nations, Netflix is also developing a tool that will enable you to monitor account usage and set access limits. You may add one additional home if you’re on the Basic plan, up to two if you’re on the Standard plan, and up to three if you’re on the Premium plan.
Netflix’s head of product innovation, Chengyi Long, praised the fact that its users wanted to share Netflix movies and TV episodes with more people in a statement. However, the extensive usage of account sharing among households today compromises our capacity to make long-term service improvements and investments.
This extends Netflix’s current experiment, which forces customers in Colombia, Peru, and Costa Rica to pay an additional fee for users who live elsewhere. To add up to two more “subaccounts” to an existing account, Netflix presently charges subscribers an additional 2,380 CLP ($2.52 USD) in Chile, $2.99 USD in Costa Rica, and 7.9 PEN ($2.02 USD) in Peru. The business has also begun testing a profile transfer tool that is meant to make it simpler for users to move their watch history, recommendations, and My List. Password sharers can be passively encouraged by the platform to sign up for a new account or a subaccount by doing this.
Confusion was found among subscribers taking part in the test in Peru, according to a report from Rest of World in May. Some customers apparently didn’t know what Netflix’s definition of a “household” was, while others managed to sneak past a screen designed to confirm account owners.
Just a few weeks after announcing pricing increases for US consumers, Netflix initially disclosed in March that it would be researching ways to charge for password sharing. Additionally, Netflix is developing a subscription model that includes adverts, and just last week it announced a partnership with Microsoft to enable its advertising. After a subscription surge earlier in the year, the firm stated in April that it had lost subscribers for the first time in more than ten years. This gives the corporation good cause to search for other revenue-generating opportunities. On Tuesday in the late afternoon, the business will disclose its upcoming quarterly results report.