Netflix, the Silicon Valley streaming behemoth, is officially coming for your shared passwords.
After rolling out the feature (or defect) in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain in February, Netflix’s move to end account “sharing between households” — effectively cutting off Netflix login sharing — has finally come to the United States.
In a brief memo published Tuesday on its site, the company said it would send an “email to members who are sharing Netflix outside their household in the United States.” The email does not mention outright that password sharing is over, but directs users to “transfer” existing user profiles to a new account or pay to add an “extra member” for another $7.99 a month.
“A Netflix account is for use by one household,” the company’s statement reads. “Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are — at home, on the go, on holiday — and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices.”
The writing has been on the wall for a while. In February, shortly after test driving the feature on America’s northerly neighbor, the company’s U.S. help page was updated to reflect the changes to its password sharing policy; a spokesperson at the time said that the update was posted inadvertently.
During an earnings call last month, Netflix co-chief executive Greg Peters said of the international launches that an initial “cancel reaction” took place in the countries that had the features come into effect. He also admitted the quiet part out loud: These changes look “very much like a price increase” to the average consumer.
“We are now in a positive member and positive revenue position relative to pre-rollout,” Peters said about the crackdown in Canada. “So that’s a really strong confirmation that we have got an approach that we can apply in many different countries with different market characteristics, including our largest revenue countries.”
Peters went on to explain that that there were some fumbles in these international launches. He did not make any specific references, but in Peru, where iterations of the password crackdowns first began, the enforcement of the policy was spotty at best.
“But we also learned from this last set of launches about some improvements we can do, especially in areas that matter a lot to our members, things like having seamless access to Netflix as they have always been using it on the go or while traveling, as well as making sure that we have got good tools for them to manage access to their accounts and their devices,” Peters said.
The announcement was buried on Netflix’s news page, just below the news of new mobile games on Netflix and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appointment to a gimmicky “chief action officer” role at the company.