You will be able to share your recommendations, but no longer your family identifiers. Netflix announced on Tuesday that it will now have to pay a supplement to share its access codes to the service with people who are not members of your household. After years of sharing passwords between friends and relatives, the streaming giant has cut the cord. In an email sent overnight to users, the Californian company insists: “Your Netflix account is for you and for the people who live with you, that is to say your household”. Sharing with outsiders would harm the profitability of the service: “More than 100 million households share their account, which affects our ability to invest in major films and television series”, Netflix already lamented in February in a press release.
In one sentence, the VOD service betrays an open secret: it has known for years who is connecting and how. He can thus quickly disconnect external accounts. “They have algorithms that automatically recognize the IP address located by region but also the Mac address specific to the network card of a device”, underlines Hervé Lemaire, boss of LeakID, an SME specializing in content protection.
Subscribers and others already identified
“They also know the profiles that access the service or which browser is used, it becomes easy to exclude them without major technical intervention”, points out the expert. Easy to sort users and differentiate the owner who pays shared accounts. The profiles that took advantage of the service for free were disconnected overnight or are about to be.
Rare clarification offered by the platform: “You can easily watch Netflix on the go or while traveling, on your personal devices or on the TV where you are”. All you need to do is connect your mobile device at least once a month – when you download the movie or series – to the Internet network that Netflix has identified as the main and paying one. Additional bad news: competitors such as Disney +, Apple TV +, Paramount or Prime Video use the same tools to monitor the video consumption of their members and their household, which is sometimes very large…
There are still several options on the table for former account “squatters” such as taking their own subscription, paying for the additional profile at 5.99 euros per month (for a single screen) or opting for the version with advertising, whose commercial success should logically fly away.