If you share your Netflix password, you’re going to have to pay up soon.
Starting next year, the streaming service will allow members to add friends or family, who don’t live with them, to their accounts- but for a fee.
Netflix made the announcement in a letter to shareholders on Tuesday.
“We’ve landed on a thoughtful approach to monetize account sharing and we’ll begin rolling this out more broadly starting in early 2023,” the letter reads. “After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create subaccounts (‘extra member’) if they want to pay for family or friends.”
The move seems similar as to what the streaming giant has been testing in Latin America according to MarketWatch. The test lets viewers watch Netflix in one designated home, but subscribers have to pay an additional $2.99 for each new home that is using the account.
“In countries with our lower-priced ad-supported plan, we expect the profile transfer option for
borrowers to be especially popular,” the letter continued to say.
It’s unclear when exactly this will go into effect for users.
Earlier this year, following a decline in subscribers, Netflix declared it would start cracking down on password sharing after turning a blind eye to it for so long.
However, in this last quarter, the streaming service said it gained 2.4 million new subscribers and expects to gain millions more by the end of the year.