For the longest time, Netflix has warned viewers against sharing their account passwords with others to save on paying for the streaming service. Today, account holders in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain will shell out extra to cover streamers using their accounts outside of the paying household.

Maybe your best friend doesn’t want to pay for Netflix, so you let them login with your password. Or, you might have setup your elderly parents with your account to enjoy some of their favourite shows at their place. Whatever the reason for handing out their passwords, Netflix isn’t happy as they’re losing out from potential paying subscribers.

According to a release from Netflix, more than 100 million households world wide are sharing their accounts, and its hitting the company’s bottom line towards funding new projects. As a result, changes are being gradually introduced in different markets, with Canada among the first. Details regarding how much money Netflix is missing out as a result of password sharing wasn’t mentioned, but the company made $31,615,550 USD in revenue for 2022, up nearly two million over 2021.

Now, account holders can set a primary location which allows anyone in one house use the account. This also includes a feature to see which devices have access and manage them remotely. For those who like to travel, they can still use their use their personal devices to stream media or log into a new TV at a hotel or rental property — provided they log out afterwards.

Currently, Netflix offers four tiers of pricing: Basic with advertisements, Basic, Standard and Premium. Basic with ads is the cheapest for $5.99 CAD a month, the pricier Premium at $20.99 CAD a month which streams video in 4K resolution and across multiple devices simultaneously.

The big change comes to those who have multiple people logging in and watching from one account. With a Standard or Premium plan, additional profiles complete with a login and password are available for purchase at $7.99 CAD. There’s a limit of one extra profile on the Standard plan, and two for Premium. That makes it harder to give more than a few folks the password. Those with the Basic with ads or Basic plans cannot pay for extra accounts unless they upgrade to a higher tier.

It’s not known if Netflix will take additional actions against prolific account sharers.

Source: Netflix press release

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