For some time, Netflix has been studying new strategies to combat customer churn. last november Netflix ‘low cost’ arrived in Spain, a new subscription plan that allows users to pay a lower fee (5.49 euros per month) in exchange for having to watch advertising, a tactic to encourage the population to decide to pay for the service of movies, series and documentaries it offers. But the ‘streaming’ giant is aware that the popular practice of Sharing an account among several users is also negatively affecting it and stopping it will be one of its priority objectives for the new year 2023.
According to the figures handled by Netflix, the company has 223 million subscribers in the world, but some 100 million people access your service without paying, because they share an account with other users. Reed Hastings, co-founder of the company, already announced it to his investors last April: “Our relatively high penetration in households (including the large number of households that share accounts), combined with competition, is creating difficulties for the growth of income”. And the time has come to move tab to solve the problem.
The North American medium ‘The Wall Street Journal’ assures that Netflix plans to implement a system in 2023 that will force users to pay for sharing their passwords. The company has already tested it in five countries: Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where it has begun to collect additional fees of $2.99 per month to those subscribers who logged in away from home. It’s called ‘Netflix Homes’, and, in addition to the extra payment, it requires users who are outside the main home of the account, who enter a validation code on the screen when logging in It expires after 15 minutes. All this with the aim of stopping the access of people from outside the same family unit.
It is expected that in Spain and the rest of the countries similar measures will not take long to be applied, and although everything indicates that they will be implemented next year, there is no official forecast of when it will be executed or of the new restrictions that the service will incorporate, since the pilot tests launched in Latin America have revealed a series of drawbacks that the audiovisual platform should correct before starting the global war against shared passwords.
Related news
To the company It hasn’t been so easy to pinpoint the location of subscribers. I used to rely on account history, IP addresses, and device identifiers, but these systems aren’t reliable in scenarios like a family wanting to watch movies on the go. travel or when you are in your second homenor in certain markets such as India, with a large percentage of subscribers who access the catalog from their mobile phones, while they are away from home or on public transportand using the data internet connection.
The first viewers affected by these new terms of use have already complained about various problems regarding accessibility to content from outside their homes, and although we still have to wait and see what Netflix’s final line of action will be, it is possible that Through this strategy, the platform does not obtain the expected results and ends up running the risk of further decrease your subscriber base.