Netflix’s efforts to end password sharing in the United States seem to have paid off as the company reportedly gained a large number of new subscribers on implementing a policy to block the practice.
A Bloomberg report stated that the video streaming platform has added more than 280,000 new members to its service as a result of its latest crackdown on password sharing in the US market.
On average, Netflix reportedly earned 70,000 subscribers a day in four days after the service started informing users that they can no longer share passwords with friends or any other person apart from their housemates. On one of the days, around 100,000 new users signed up to Netflix in the US.
The company has previously revealed that its service is being used by as many as 100 million households for free in all the regions where the service is active. Netflix has been witnessing low revenue and slow subscriber growth for a long time now and decided to crack down on password sharing to boost its revenue.
The video streaming platform also introduced a new affordable ad-supported subscription back in November last year to improve business in terms of revenue while also offering lower price plans to users. Netflix first tried to limit password sharing in locations like Latin America and later introduced the same programme in more countries such as Spain, Australia and has now reached the US.
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Under the new policy, Netflix automatically analyses subscribers’ location data through a combination of logged IP addresses, logged device IDs, and account activity and assigns a primary location to every account. One Netflix account is pinned to a particular location and the account should be activated from the household location at least once a month to continue using Netflix without paying additional charges.
Netflix hasn't yet introduced this policy in the India market, but has already confirmed that it will gradually push out the update to different regions. India, as one of the key markets for the platform and with a high frequency of subscribers sharing passwords and accounts, is likely to be one of the streaming platform’s main targets.