Netflix Tells US Members Accounts Are for One Household

Netflix has begun its long-threatened crackdown on password sharing.

The streaming service will begin sending an email Tuesday (May 23) to members who share Netflix outside their household in the U.S., reminding them that an account is for use by only one household, Netflix said in a Tuesday press release.

“Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with — your household,” Netflix said in the email to members, according to the release. “You can easily watch Netflix on the go and when you travel — either on your personal devices or a TV at a hotel or vacation home.”

In the email, Netflix also explained how to control which devices are using an account and how to share Netflix with someone outside the household — by transferring a profile to a new membership that they pay for or by buying an extra member for an existing account.

As PYMNTS reported in October 2022, Netflix’s then-threatened crackdown on password sharing was slated to take effect sometime this year but has been an open wound for the company for over a decade.

Previously Netflix would just grow its way through problems like password sharing, but the company now has a different view.

In October 2022, Greg Peters, who was chief operating officer at the time and is now co-CEO of Netflix, said during a quarterly earnings call that the company was working to find a solution that encompasses customer choice and the company’s long history of customer centricity, and that the offers of profile transfer and paid account sharing would do so.

“We think [this dual approach] has informed how we think about establishing our service by balancing [user needs] with making sure that as a business we’re getting paid when we’re delivering entertainment value to consumers,” Peters said at the time.

PYMNTS research has found that 60% of subscribers to retail product subscriptions of all types admit to cheating to gain extra benefits from subscription services.

In addition, more than half of subscribers think taking advantage of subscription merchants’ benefits is very or extremely easy, according to the “Subscription Commerce Conversion Index: The Challenge of Cheaters,” a PYMNTS and sticky.io collaboration.