All the deadbeats who stream free videos off someone else’s Netflix password are about to be cut off. If you want to continue the privilege you need to fork over the fee. There are more movie thieves out there than corporate honchos imagined.
We know you share our stream
Sorry folks, but you aren’t as slick as you thought you were. Casual sharing of Netflix passwords is thievery, they insist. Their IT guys know you do it. They also found a way to stop the stream for freeloaders.
People have been sharing their password ever since the company opened. “Many users buy the subscription and lend out the password to their friends or family so that they can also watch on the same account.” Until now, they’ve been looking the other way.
“So far,” Appuals writes, “this has been a relatively harmless practice as this doesn’t explicitly advocate for piracy or dangle on the lines of legality. However, the company has tried to restrict this behavior several times in the past.” It didn’t work. Now, it might.
“It looks like things are finally about to get serious.” The movie stream service dropped a blog post about it titled “Paying to Share Outside Your Household.” They have a new “feature” to roll out.
According to Netflix, “a new feature pertaining to controlling password sharing is ready and most likely launching very soon.”
They don’t care if you share your stream with an adult kid in the basement. They want you to stop sharing it with cousins across town. “This is aimed at limiting password sharing outside the household, and not within.”
Pay up or do without
The Netflix director of product information, Chenyi Long, explains, “We’ve always made it easy for people who live together to share their Netflix account, with features like separate profiles and multiple streams in our Standard and Premium plans.” They gave the public an inch and they took light years.
“While these have been hugely popular, they have also created some confusion about when and how Netflix can be shared.” Get your own darn stream, ya cheap bleepard. “As a result, accounts are being shared between households – impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.”
Netflix is currently testing the “Add an Extra Member” feature to “allow account owners to add up to two members who don’t live with them under their account.”
What that means is if you let a friend stream under your account “in the future they are going to have to pay an extra fee to gain their own sub-account under yours.” Nobody is going to jail or anything though.
The sub-account stream is purely optional. “if you choose not to pay, then they simply won’t be able to access your account.” Before they freak out their biggest users in America, they’re testing things out in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru.
The plus side of forking out the cash for a sub-account is that you get to keep all your bookmarks. “The playlists, recommendations, and all settings associated with the user profile will not be lost and simply carry over to the master account, either new or existing.“
