After years of promising to do so, Netflix is finally clamping down on people sharing their accounts with those “outside their household”.
Sending emails to UK customers who are sharing their account details with other friends and family outside their own residence, the streaming service is letting users know that if they are wishing to do this in the future, they need to pay £4.99 for the luxury. Having lost subscribers to other rival streaming services such as Disney+ and Amazon Prime, Netflix has struggled to keep up with the competition.
Posting a statement online, the streaming service wrote: “Starting today, we will be sending this email to members who are sharing Netflix outside their household in the United Kingdom.
A Netflix account is for use by one household…Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are – at home, on the go, on holiday – and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices”.
Netflix shared ways in which accounts could be shared going forward, with each option meaning that users have to pay more to use the service. Either, users can “transfer a profile” to a “new membership that they pay for”, or they can pay £4.99 extra per month to add a new person to their account.
A similar decision has been made for users in America, see a screenshot sent to American users in the post below.