If you’re sharing a Netflix password with your friends or a disembodied hand meant to spy on your while you’re away at private school, be prepared to hear from Netflix Headquarters very soon. The streaming giant has been threatening to stop users from mooching for almost a year, and they made their intentions known at the end of 2022 that we’d be seeing a plan put into place to remove out-of-household user access in “early” 2023. Well, guess what? It’s now early 2023, and Netflix chose its fourth quarter earnings report to announce the beginning of the end for letting your barber watch Bo Burnham stand-up shows on your dime.
According to the report (via The Hollywood Reporter), the earnings letter reported a cartoonishly high amount of profile sharing among users.
“Today’s widespread account sharing (100M+ households) undermines our long term ability to invest in and improve Netflix, as well as build our business. While our terms of use limit use of Netflix to a household, we recognize this is a change for members who share their account more broadly,” Netflix said.
100M+? Almost half of all Netflix accounts let someone mooch? That seems difficult to believe, but it would also point to why the company is so steadfast in this totally bummer move.
“Part of it is what we call casual sharing, which is people could pay, but they don’t need to and so they’re borrowing somebody’s account. So our job is to give them a little bit of a nudge and to create features that make transitioning to their own account easy and simple,” co-CEO Greg Peters said.
The strategy makes sense, but the big question is whether that nudge will send people looking for their credit cards or learning to live without the final seasons of Stranger Things.
(via The Hollywood Reporter)