Netflix is about to cost you more money.

Netflix doesn’t want you to share your account or password with your friends and family. To ensure that, it is bringing a new feature it is trialling in which you are expected to pay for the ability to share your account with others.

Netflix posts about password sharing

A Netflix blog post reads, “We’ve always made it easy for people who live together to share their Netflix account, with features like separate profiles and multiple streams in our Standard and Premium plans. While these have been hugely popular, they have also created some confusion about when and how Netflix can be shared. As a result, accounts are being shared between households – impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films for our members.”

 

Only Netflix users in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru would be the ones who will experience the new anti-account sharing feature via a contained test. The test regarding password and multi-household account sharing will add two new features, a user’s ability to add an extra member and their ability to transfer a profile to a new account.

 

According to the extra member feature, users can add sub-accounts to their account, especially for people they don’t live with. A sub-account user will get access to their profile, personalized recommendations, and login and password. It will be less costly than a solo Netflix account. It will cost 2,380 CLP in Chile, 7.9 PEN in Peru, and $US2.99 in Costa Rica. Those prices translate to approximately $4.10 in Australia.

 

The other feature will allow members to transfer the profile information to a new account or a sub-account while keeping My List, history, and recommendations the same.

In the countries where the new trial is planned, users who share their accounts outside the household will be notified by email and Netflix that the extra features will be added.

Currently, Netflix uses phone and email verification prompts to keep account sharing under control when an account is accessed outside of a household or persistently accessed from a location outside of the household, but, this isn’t a solution for the streaming giant’s problem. With that, Netflix could start geo-blocking people who are far from their home address.

The second feature might help Netflix users to save some money. For instance, if all your family members use a different Netflix account, you can consolidate them under a master account and save money.

There is no word yet on when the crackdown on password and multi-household account sharing will arrive in Australia.

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