Netflix has unveiled its plans to prevent password sharing between people in households outside of an account owner’s primary location.
Based on info sourced from Netflix’s support pages, The Streamable reported on Tuesday details about its upcoming anti-password sharing efforts.
Netflix has been testing the program with subscribers in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru since early last year, where it started to require users to pay extra for additional users located outside of the subscriber’s primary household.
Sharing passwords with people outside the subscriber’s household will likely involve an additional fee to share a single subscription across multiple locations.
The new system may also end your logging into your account to watch a show at a friend’s or relative’s house.
The streaming giant revealed plans to roll out paid sharing in its shareholder report.
“As we roll out paid sharing, members in many countries will also have the option to pay extra if they want to share Netflix with people they don’t live with.” The streaming platform revealed in its report to shareholders.
Based on a trial of the new stricter rules last year, the company acknowledged it expects a negative reaction in the short term.
Here’s how it will work.
“To ensure uninterrupted access to Netflix, connect to the Wi-Fi at your primary location, open the Netflix app or website, and watch something at least once every 31 days. This creates a trusted device so you can watch Netflix, even when you’re away from your primary location,” the company wrote in an updated Help Center document.
If you’re traveling, you’ll be able to watch Netflix simply by logging into your account. But if you’re away for an “extended period of time”, presumably, more than 31 days, Netflix says that “your device may be blocked from watching Netflix.” The solution to this is requesting a “temporary access code to continue watching,” Netflix says.
There’s a caveat to this. The updated help document doesn’t appear to be online anymore, though it is accessible via Wayback Machine which keeps old snapshots of websites on the internet.
So, Netflix may change certain details before it starts enforcing the Wi-Fi connection rule.