Netflix announced this Wednesday that it is ending shared accounts between different households in Spain, which require subscribers to determine the main location of their account by connecting the device or application to an IP address.
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Additionally, subscribers who have a second home or frequently travel to the same location should open the Netflix app on their mobile devices once a month while connected to their main location’s WiFi, then they must do so when they get there the second Location, according to a statement from the platform.
This plan, which will also be used in Portugal, New Zealand and Canada, is based on the solutions tested in joint accounts in Latin America over the past year, the platform’s director of product innovation, Chengyi Long, said in a statement to the company blog. “We’ve always made it easy for people living under one roof to share their Netflix account with features like profiles and multi-screen viewing. While they’ve been hugely successful, they’ve also created some confusion about when and how you can share Netflix.”
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From this point forward, subscribers should have “greater control over who can access their account” from Netflix, which is “designed for a single home” and for the people who live in it, according to the note that the company will do so “Help me set up” each account to set the primary location. With these innovations, subscribers can control who uses their contract: “Our main goal was to give subscribers better control over who can access their account,” they point out.
As before, subscribers to the Standard or Premium plans in many countries (including Canada, Spain, New Zealand, and Portugal) can add “sub-accounts” for a maximum of two people they don’t live with. Each of these sub-accounts has its own profile, personalized recommendations, username and password, for an additional fee of 5.99 euros per month per person (in Spain). In addition, those who start using their own paid account can move their profile and keep their personalized recommendations, viewing history, list or saved games. Complaints quickly arose on the networks, as now single-screen subscriptions (€7.99) see the content at 720p, and to see it in 4K you have to pay €17.99.
Regarding using the platform while traveling, they ensure that “subscribers can watch Netflix on their personal devices as always, or sign in on another TV (e.g. in a hotel or vacation rental)”. The platform reminds that currently “more than 100 million households share their accounts, which limits our ability to invest in creating great stories told with series and films of the highest quality”.
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