Casablanca – While struggling to regain subscribers and recover its revenue, Netflix plans to restrict customers from sharing their accounts on the streaming service, which allows “out-of-home” users to use the same subscription for free.
Starting next year, the streaming giant intends to introduce a new service that will compel customers to pay for “extra member” sub-accounts when people outside their household want to use their membership.
“We’ve landed on a thoughtful approach to monetize account sharing and we’ll begin rolling this out more broadly starting in early 2023,” Netflix said in a letter to shareholders.
“After listening to consumer feedback, we are going to offer the ability for borrowers to transfer their Netflix profile into their own account, and for sharers to manage their devices more easily and to create sub-accounts, if they want to pay for family or friends,” the statement added.
When the company revealed the plan earlier this week, it did not confirm any additional costs.
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The new program has already been tested in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru. Customers paid less than $3 per month to add up to two users, which is around one-quarter the cost of a standard Netflix membership.
On November 3, Netflix also announced the launch of its new “Basic with Ads” package in several countries. A lower-cost membership with advertising in which ads will run for 15 or 30 seconds before and during series and movies.
Earlier this year, the streaming company suffered its first-ever subscriber loss in a decade, with the number of customers decreasing by 1.3 million in the United States and Canada in addition to one million internationally in the latest quarter.
