Today Netflix reported its 4th quarter 2022 numbers. We also learned a lot about the company’s future plans, including that Netflix’s founder and CEO is stepping down as CEO. We also learned that Netflix plans to expand its paid password-sharing subscription service to more people.
“While our terms of use limit use of Netflix to a household, we recognize this is a change for members who share their account more broadly,” Netflix said in a statement. “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.”
In short, Netflix wants you to pay more in order to share your subscription with other people who do not live with you.
This is not new, as Netflix has been busy working to stop the free sharing of passwords between friends and family members. Now instead of stopping it, Netflix is hoping you will just pay a little bit more to be able to share passwords.
In South America, Netflix has already started to test this by promoting users they suspect of sharing their passwords with an option to buy an extra sub-account. However, it has reportedly not been going well, as many have not opted to pay the extra fee voluntarily.
Netflix has been looking for new ways recently to get revenue, including the launch of an ad-supported plan. “Overall the reaction to this launch from both consumers and advertisers has confirmed our belief that our ad-supported plan has strong unit economics (at minimum, in-line with or better than the comparable ad-free plan) and will generate incremental revenue and profit, though the impact on 2023 will be modest given that this will build slowly over time,” the company writes.
For now, we will have to wait and see what happens as Netflix faces strong competition from the likes of Disney+, Hulu, Amazon, Paramount+, HBO Max, and more.