Image: Netflix
If (not on us) you broke up with a spouse in the last decade, moved out of a shared apartment or even moved out of your parents’ house for the first time – it is likely that you encountered a strange first world problem: what to do with the Netflix account? Are you giving up the profile you created that includes all your viewing history and preferences? Who takes the old account and who will have to open a new one? Just kidding – we know you do the expected thing and just stay on the same account with people who don’t live with you to save money. Precisely because of this, Netflix is launching a new feature that, like the school bell – it’s not exactly for you, it’s actually for her.
Account sharing is about to stop – and that’s the carrot on the way to the stick
Last April, Netflix revealed its quarterly reports, in which it announced for the first time that it was losing subscribers at a dizzying rate, and that the worst is yet to come in terms of abandonment. The reasons are varied: from the boycott of Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, to the excessive growth following the epidemic, and of course to its who knows how much price increase. But according to Netflix, it has a deeper problem, and that is account sharing. In her estimation, about 100 million households around the world share passwords in a way that goes against Netflix’s regulations. This number makes up almost half of its total subscribers. If you didn’t know it until now, we will tell you that according to the Netflix regulations, you are supposed to share passwords only with those who physically live in the same house with you. The mythical ex? Your brothers who live in another city? your parents? The former roommates from the student dorms? Any such entity should purchase an appointment for itself.
So Netflix has a problem and it’s called account sharing. It has already started trying to solve it with all kinds of experiments, and just this year it was reported that it is starting to demand an additional payment for shared accounts, so far only in South America. But if we were betting people, we’d put quite a few scythes, gouges and one ship on the fact that this experiment will eventually expand to the rest of the world, which means that the days when you didn’t pay your Netflix bill and transferred the pleasure to someone else are numbered.
Just before it apparently expands this experiment and throws the stick at you, Netflix gives you a kind of carrot: the company announced a new feature called Profile Transfer, which allows you to take your existing profile and transfer it to a completely new subscription. That way, if and when Netflix forces you to open your own account, you can take with you your viewing recommendations, viewing history, watch list, settings, and even your games and saves (if you ever bothered to play Netflix games at all) – when the only thing that will change is the fact that you started paying for the account your.
How simple it is to put a new credit
The new feature is already starting to roll out to customers these days, and you can find it by clicking on your profile icon and selecting Transfer Account. After that, you will be taken to a page that will ask you to enter a username and password for your new account, and in the next step, we assume that you will also need to enter new credit information. Your original profile will also be saved in the account you’re switching from, so if you happen to return to your ex like you always do, you can also go back and use your profile again. With the help of the new feature, you will not lose your profile with all your history when you have to open a new paying account.
According to Netflix, the feature was on trial, among other things, in those countries where the company had already started to curb the sharing of passwords, and it was a great success, which leads to its expansion into an official feature worldwide. There is not too much doubt here – Netflix is preparing the ground for a move to close the tap for sharing passwords and accounts. It is sitting on a potential mine of millions of paying users, and it will do everything it can to ensure that they connect to it – whether it is voluntarily by offering a discounted ad-based subscription, or by simply disabling shared accounts illegally. You just have to prepare mentally and financially.