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Sharing your Netflix password with friends and family in the UAE will soon be a thing of the past.
The US-based streaming giant has confirmed that account sharing between households will be addressed in all remaining countries, including the UAE, that have not been affected until now, starting today.
“Beginning today, we’ll start to address account sharing between households in almost all of our remaining countries. In these markets, we’re not offering an extra member option given that we’ve recently cut prices in a good number of these countries (for example, Indonesia, Croatia, Kenya, and India) and penetration is still relatively low in many of them so we have plenty of runway without creating additional complexity,” Netflix said in a statement.
Netflix’s subscriber numbers increased to 5.9 million in its second quarter, fuelled by a crackdown on password sharing in more than 100 countries in May.
UAE subscribers are yet to receive an official update from the streaming giant about the imminent rollout at the time of writing.
Subscribers in India woke up this morning to a paid sharing update from Netflix.
“Starting today, we will be sending this email to members who are sharing Netflix outside their household in India,” the statement read.
“A Netflix account is for use by one household. Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are at home, on the go, on holiday and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices,” it said.
Paid sharing also appeared to overshadow the company’s Q2 earnings, which were announced yesterday, seeing a lacklustre performance that saw its revenue grew by just 2.7% to $8.2 billion, coming in slightly below analysts’ estimates.
Netflix has projected its Q3 revenue to reach $8.5 billion, while further stating that it was still ‘targeting a full year 2023 operating margin of 18% to 20%’, largely buoyed by its paid sharing model.
Tackling account sharing between household has been a focus this year, ‘as it undermines our ability to invest to improve Netflix for our paying members and grow our business’, the company said.
“In May, we expanded paid sharing to 100+, which account for over 80% of our revenue. The cancel reaction was low and while we’re still in the early stages of monetization, we’re seeing healthy conversion of borrower households into full paying Netflix memberships as well as the uptake of our extra member feature,” Nextflix said in a statement to shareholders.
In Wednesday’s earnings call, Netflix Co-CEO, President and Director Gregory K. Peters also weighed in on the paid sharing model without specifying a region wise timeline for the rollout.
“As of today, we’ve now launched that experience in almost all the countries that we operate in, and we’re seeing that it's working. We’re positive in terms of both revenue and subscribers relative to prelaunch in all of our regions,” Peters said, adding that the paid sharing model has not be an overnight decision for the streamer.
What is a Netflix household
A Netflix account is meant to be shared by people who live together in one household. People who are not in one household will need to sign up for their own account to watch Netflix.
Subscribers will have the ability to manage who uses their account by setting up a Netflix household, which is defined by a collection of devices connected to the internet at the main place a subscriber watches Netflix.
A Netflix household can be set up using a TV device. All other devices that use the Netflix account on the same internet connection as this TV will automatically be part of the household.
If a user outside the household tries to access Netflix, there will be a prompt in service, but they will not be blocked without any notice.
(Reporting by Bindu Rai; editing by Seban Scaria)
