Newsletter
We know that Netflix is looking for more ways to turn its misfortunes around. This included charging additional money for people to share their passwords with other users in different households. This saga is not finished, as Netflix plans on charging an additional password-sharing fee to US users next year.
Netflix has been testing this in South America. Users who wanted to share their passwords with other people would have to pay an additional fee. This will obviously prompt many people to delete your accounts rather than cough up more money. However, this isn’t something that Netflix didn’t expect.
US Netflix users will need to pay a password sharing fee
Netflix was only testing the waters in South America. According to The Wall Street Journal, (via XDA Developers) Netflix is getting this feature ready for a broader audience. The Source says that the streaming giant will start charging American customers early next year. Seeing as it’s late December, it won’t be much of a wait. When that does happen, users may have to pay an additional $3/month (We’ll need to wait on final confirmation on the price to say for sure) for their service. That will push the most expensive when up to $22.99 a month.
How could this work? We don’t know for sure how this will work in the States, but we feel that it may be similar to how it’s handled in South America. The company keeps track of IP addresses, account activity, and device IDs. When it detects that a person is using someone else’s account, it will block access for that person at first.
At that point, the account holder will be prompted to add on the additional package to their plan. Then, the account holder will be given a verification code. The account holder is supposed to send that verification code to the other person. The other user will then enter the verification code sent by the account holder and they’ll be able to access the content.
As you can expect, people will not take kindly to this. A lot of users share their passwords with family members and friends. We can expect a lot of people to drop their subscriptions altogether. For all we know, this may actually do more harm than good.