Netflix has finally dropped the shoe in India by restricting password sharing. A feature that it has been talking about for years now. Netflix account holders can no longer share their passwords with their friends and family members sitting miles away from them.
One Netflix account can now be used by users living under one roof only, or as Netflix calls it “one single household”. These users can access the account while they are in the house, or on move or on a vacation. The company has announced strict regulations to keep the users in check. Netflix will verify a home device by verification code and that the device has to connect to the home Wi-Fi network at least once in a month.
The streaming platform has put off this moment for years now.
Back in 2019, when Netflix saw a drop in subscriber count, it identified that password sharing was eating into the subscriber growth. However, the COVID-led lockdown brought a wave of new subscribers to the platform which masked the extent of the password-sharing issue. Back in 2022, Netflix witnessed a loss of 9,70,000 subscribers, which was the largest quarterly loss ever. That’s when Netflix started restricting password sharing in some parts of the world.
It was a risky move as it was expected to anger the consumers who have a pool of streaming platforms to choose from and question the company’s goodwill that it had built over the years. It was a brutal turnaround for the company that once tweeted, “Love is sharing a password.”
To everyone’s surprise, while there was a backlash from users but in the second quarter of 2023, it gained 5.9 million paid users as compared to losing 1 million in the same quarter last year. While the growth has dialed down the pressure on the company, drawing a hard line on who should be allowed to share password is a tricky task. There are still many questions like should kids be able to share their parent’s password while going off to college or moving in to another city? What if I travel a lot or have a second home? Well, these questions are yet to be answered by the company.
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