If you’ve recently (or not too long ago) moved out of your parents’ house and expected to keep sharing your Netflix login indefinitely, we’ve got grim news. The largest paid streaming service in the business has decided its 221 million subscribers aren’t enough. On March 16, Netflix decided that its final front in the streaming wars would be password sharing. In a blog post titled “Netflix Sharing Charges Outside Your Family,” the company announced that it is testing measures that would charge additional fees for allowing users to stream outside of a given family — a reckless ploy that would target both college students, as well as empty ones. parents nest everywhere.
Claiming that existing Netflix profile options have “created some confusion about when and how to share Netflix,” the blog post talks about testing two new so-called “features” in the next few weeks for members in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru: The ability to add an “additional account” for which you will have to pay extra, and the alternative ability to transfer profiles to a new account, which will keep your algorithm creation history. Vulture asked Netflix why they chose Chile, Costa Rica and Peru as their testing grounds for this, and the post will be updated if we get a response, but they usually test products in markets outside of the United States. Instead of cutting off freeloaders, they want to turn subscribers into paying more for freeloaders. In a post, Netflix director of product innovation Chungy Long argues that password extortion is affecting “our ability to invest in great new TV shows and movies for our members.” I would say it’s actually completely normal and deploying any features that affect my dad’s ability to watch Tick, Tick… Boom! wrong business decisions at our expense. But that’s just me.
To be fair, this is just a test. At the moment. Netflix doesn’t always implement the functionality they test extensively. And the current cost of adding an additional account isn’t very high: in Costa Rica, the fee is $3 per month, on top of the country’s existing Netflix subscription tiers, which start at $9. It’s also not surprising given streaming growth across the board is slowing and the company was testing the account verification feature almost exactly a year ago. However, no customer wants to pay more for what they have been getting for free for years. Netflix, by the way, recently also raised prices in the States.