Hold up! Don’t give your mother or your best friend that password! According to The New York Daily News, Netflix is planning on preventing people from sharing their Netflix password.
The streaming service has announced they have plans for a crackdown on password sharing during a quarterly earnings call last week. Netflix product chief Greg Peters says he was aware that some users share their passwords to circumvent paying for the monthly subscription but doesn’t disclose the number of users who actually share their login credentials. “We continue to monitor,” Peters said. “We’ll continue to look at the situation and we’ll see those consumer-friendly ways to push on the edge of that, but we’ve got no big plans at this point in time in terms of doing something different there.”
The streaming service already limits the number of devices that can stream content from one account, and users can currently share accounts but they are required to limit them under one household by setting up separate individual profiles. A basic plan costs $8.99 monthly and the user can stream on only one screen at a time. A standard account costs $12.99 and allows subscribers to watch on two screens at the same time, while a premium plan costs $15.99 a month and allows subscribers of one account to watch the service on up to four screens.
In other Netflix news, according to Variety, Netflix’s shares dipped after CEO Reed Hastings acknowledged that he saw “tough competition” coming from new entrants in the streaming wars. “While we’ve been competing with many people in the last decade, it’s a whole new world starting in November… between Apple launching and Disney launching, and of course Amazon’s ramping up,” Hastings said at a conference in Cambridge, England. On Monday, Netflix announced plans to raise another $2 billion through a debt offering, which would bring its long-term debt load to over $14 billion.
The streaming platform also announced it added 6.77 million paid subscribers in the quarter that ended in September, chalking up some of the success to its hit shows that include Stranger Things and 13 Reasons Why.