Netflix will soon monitor if its users are sharing their account passwords.
In a new interview in which the executives discussed the company’s Q3 2019 Earnings, Chief Product Officer Greg Peters said that Netflix was “continuing to monitor” the situation.
His comment has been interpreted as hinting that the company will start looking at ways in which it can quash the practice of password sharing.
But Peters was quick to clarify this would be done in a way that would not alienate the service’s existing user base.
Peters said
“We’ll see those consumer-friendly ways to push on the edges of that. We have no plans to announce at this point in time, in terms of doing something differently.”
When users share passwords, they are essentially sharing a single Netflix account, which naturally circumvents Netflix’s business model, according to which each household needs to have its own account.
Currently, up to four devices can stream Netflix at any one time but the amount of people a subscriber can share their password with is essentially unlimited.
The changes now require members of a family plan to verify that they are all living at the same address, with a spokesperson telling 7NEWS.com.au that plan owners will be required “to provide a valid home address at signup using Google Maps“.
The spokesperson said,
“Family members can verify their eligibility by entering their address using Google Maps or enabling location services on their device.”
Netflix certainly wouldn’t be the first subscription service to crack down on users sharing passwords and accounts.
