No more sharing your password with friends. Netflix announced that it will begin testing a new “add a home” feature that will charge users who share their account with others.
The “add a home” feature will be released in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras next month.
In these test regions, each Netflix account will include one home where you can access Netflix on any of your devices. To allow another account in an additional home, the company will ask you to pay a fee.
Members on the Basic plan will be able to add one extra home through their account settings, whereas Standard users can add up to two extra homes, and Premium can add up to three.
“It’s great that our members love Netflix movies and TV shows so much they want to share them more broadly,” said Netflix’s director of product innovation, Chengyi Long, in a statement. “But today’s widespread account sharing between households undermines our long-term ability to invest in and improve our service.”
This feature expands on a previous, similar feature that the streaming service launched in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru earlier this year called “add extra member.” As part of that test, subscribers were asked to pay extra if they were sharing the service with people outside their own household, allowing users to add up to two “sub accounts” for a fee.
Netflix said that this solution doesn’t rely on location-based data, like GPS. Instead, it uses information such as IP addresses and device IDs.
During its first-quarter earnings call, the company announced that it will start charging members for account sharing, iterating on the feature for a year or so until it reaches a decision on how much to charge extra subscribers.
Today, Netflix estimates that there are around 100 million households sharing their user accounts globally, with over 30 million of those in the U.S. and Canada alone.
This is not the only way Netflix is planning on monetizing the service. The company is also planning on introducing ads to the streaming service.
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