Netflix to the charge against shared accounts in Europe

For a long time, we have seen how Netflix has been taking various actions to prevent users from “misusing” their family plan, sharing the password and access to this account between members of different households (one of the most common practices Extended Premium Plan).

Thus, as happened last March, it seems that the company wanted to start a little stronger this year, having already shown the first warnings and measures among some users in Europe. Repeating with their usual method, some users have already encountered a small block when logging in to their different devices. They were asked to enter a security code sent to their phone or email to regain access to the application.

Although Netflix assures that “this test is designed to help ensure that people who use Netflix accounts are authorized to do so ” when there are suspicions that someone else is using another user’s account, it is well known that this practice is focused on trying to reduce sharing.

As some websites have already reported, the main focus is on Italy. However, some warnings have already been sent to users in other European countries, including Spain, so it would not be surprising that we will soon see an escalation of these actions in our country.

According to the latest reports presented by the company, Netflix is ​​losing $ 9 billion per year from these shared password accounts. However, it presumably also knows that a significant number of these users would not be subscribers if it could not divide the cost of this account between Other users. And it is undoubtedly an effective way to capture some users who make less intense or more intermittent use of the platform.

However, we do not doubt that if Netflix were to take more severe measures to put an end to the exchange of passwords between people from different households, the reaction of users would be tremendously adverse and could even lead to losses. Greater than currently declared.

Fortunately, it seems that the company is aware of this, limiting itself for the moment to this method that, although it is easy to avoid on many occasions, still achieves its goal of transforming some of these Premium accounts into multiple Standard subscriptions.