Account sharing is a real problem for Netflix and it has been testing ways to address this for a few months now.
The latest test sees Netflix asking users to add a home to their account for a small fee. For now the test is limited to Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Users will have one “home” where they will be able to access their account from. This “home” includes the option to travel so you won’t have to purchase a home if you are travelling. However, according to a report by The Verge, there are some serious limitations in place. For one, users who travel will only be able to access their account for two weeks and they can only access their account from that location once a year. Thereafter, you will seemingly have to add a home.
The ability to add a home will cost 219 Pesos in Argentina and $2.99 in all of the other countries this test is being conducted. Netflix states that Basic subscribers can add one extra home, Standard can add two and Premium account holders can add up to three extra homes.
Account holders will also have the ability to manage their homes at any time from the account settings page.
As for how Netflix will be tracking who is using what account where, the platform will use information garnered from IP addresses, device IDs and account activity.
We’ll be frank, this is a bad idea. Not only from the perspective that it unnecessarily limits the access folks who travel have to their account, but it also brings up questions about content access. We’re sure this will be addressed in updated terms of service but, if a user is paying for a household in the US because they travel their often, will they be allowed to use a VPN to access that content in South Africa for example? We very much doubt it but these are things Netflix will have to consider.
“It’s great that our members love Netflix movies and TV shows so much they want to share them more broadly. But today’s widespread account sharing between households undermines our long term ability to invest in and improve our service,” Netflix’s director of product innovation, Chengyi Long, said in a statement.
This latest test appears to be operating in tandem with another that asks subscribers in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru to pay to add users to their account.
While we’d rather not pay to share an account and decide which four users we’d like to share account with, we’d prefer paying for additional users. This is because adding a home is surely not going to add the same amount of profiles that the main home allows. This means that you could end up paying for an additional home but still have to share a profile with somebody else. Let us just pay for the user and you track how that individual user accesses the content Netflix.
With that having been said, we hope Netflix has more tests to address password sharing among users because while it’s really become a problem for the platform. We don’t like the idea of paying to limit our use of the platform even more than it is already.
Netflix believes 130 million households are using a shared account
