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Netflix is planning to deal with uncontrolled account sharing, a program that lets members pay extra to share their accounts with people outside their households.
On Wednesday, the streaming giant introduced paid sharing in European countries like Portugal, Spain, and Canada which was previously rolled out in multiple markets in Latin America.
While Netflix won’t say when paid sharing will come to other countries, some version of the plan is expected to be introduced in the U.S. in the next few weeks - one-third of its subscribers live in US and Canada.
Netflix has almost 231 million paid subscribers in 190 countries. Thereby the company estimates that about 100 million households are currently sharing their accounts with others, which impacts the company’s ability to invest in new programming and it continues to incur losses.
But growing competition in the streaming market, and customers cutting back on subscriptions due to the rising cost of living, have prompted Netflix to focus on shoring up its revenues.
The firm said that allowing accounts to be used by several people within households had "created confusion" about when and how people could share.
“We’ve always made it easy for people who live together to share their Netflix account with features like profiles and multiple streams,” the company said in a blog post-Wednesday.
“While these have been hugely popular, they’ve also created confusion about when and how you can share Netflix password"
It said members in Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal would now be asked to set up a "primary location" for their account and manage who has access to it and can only add one person who is not from the family or household.
"Members would still be able to watch Netflix when they travelled, both on personal devices and logging in in other places, for example in a hotel, it said," they added.
