Big blow! No more FREELOADING on Netflix

Netflix is all set to stop subscribers from sharing passwords.

Netflix to add surcharge for sharing passwords from next year. (Flickr)

Netflix is all set to crack down on password sharing. The video streaming giant is likely to scrap the password sharing feature by next year. The streaming giant will be adding a surcharge to the subscribers who share their account details with other households. Netflix has been testing this for quite some time now. The streaming service said during its quarterly earnings call on Tuesday that it would start charging additional fees from those who share their login ID and password from 2023. Though the streaming service has not revealed how much the users will be charged for sharing their passwords, it is expected to be somewhere between $3 to $4.

Earlier, a report by New York Times stated that Netflix executives in a note shared that the crackdown on password sharing is likely to begin in the last three months of 2022 i.e, October.

This decision was taken earlier this year, after Netflix lost nearly 200,000 subscribers in the first first quarter of the year. This had happened for the first time in a decade that Netflix's share price fell by more than $54 billion.

In its quarterly report, the OTT service provider mentioned, “As it's become clear that streaming is the future of entertainment, our competitors – including media companies and tech players – are investing billions of dollars to scale their new services."

It also added, “But it's hard to build a large and profitable streaming business – our best estimate is that all of these competitors are losing money on streaming, with aggregate annual direct operating losses this year alone that could be well in excess of $10 billion, compared with our +$5-$6 billion of annual operating profit.

How will Netflix free password sharing service crackdown can affect you?

As soon as this policy is rolled out, sharing your Netflix account with anybody outside of where you live will cost you more. You'll have to pay a surcharge to have Netflix on a device in someone else's home.