US streaming giant Netflix announced on Wednesday that it will conduct trials in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru to charge customers for sharing their passwords outside their homes.
Subscribers will need to pay an amount in addition to their monthly subscription (approximately $3 in Chile, $2.99 in Costa Rica and approximately $2.12 in Peru) to be able to add up to two additional accounts to their profile.
“We’ve always made it easy for people who live together to share their Netflix accounts with features like separate profiles and simultaneous streams for our Standard and Premium subscriptions.“said in a press release Chengyi Long, director of product innovation at Netflix.
“While these features are extremely popular, they have also created a form of confusion regarding when and how Netflix might be shared.“, she added. “As a result, accounts are shared between different households, which affects our ability to invest in quality series and movies for our members..”
One subscription per profile
In addition to paid password sharing, the Californian group will offer a service in the three test countries to transfer a profile to a new account in order to encourage the beneficiaries of password sharing to create their own subscription.
Last year, Netflix tested a way to limit the sharing of passwords by sending certain customers a warning message to verify that the user lived in the same place as the owner of the account.
After having long been lenient on the subject, Netflix seems ready to tighten the screw when its growth is running out of steam.
Competition from Disney+
The American company only gained 8.2 million paid accounts from September to December last year to end the year at 221 million and is increasingly facing competition from Disney +.
Netflix increased the price of its subscriptions in the United States and Canada in January, then did the same in March in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The prices offered by Netflix are generally higher than those of its rivals, but unlike most of them, the platform does not show any .
