It’s been a common practice to share passwords to your Netflix account with friends and family. But there’s some bad news on the horizon for you guys. Netflix is currently testing out a message that asks users to create their own accounts if they do not live in the same house as the current account owner. As of right now, the test is only rolling out to select users but if it does work, we could see the message pop up globally. Netflix has not announced anything regarding this. According to GammaWire, who first reported the feature, the number of users that have received the message seems to be rather small. Although, there have been a few reports that specific users have received warnings on Twitter but nothing has been confirmed yet.
Exchanging passwords between friends is a common occurrence, but it does kind of violate the terms of service on Netflix. It’s actually surprising that it has gone on for this long. When a user tries to log into an account that does not belong to them, they will receive a message that says, “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.”. If you do want to proceed, the original owner of the account will receive an OTP to verify the login attempt. Again, this could be easily bypassed as a simple phone call or message from the original account owner should suffice. But, it’s an extra step to just be able to watch content on Netflix.
Some users have also reported that clicking the ‘Verify Later’ button caused the message to disappear, but again, nothing has been officially announced as yet. In terms of testing out new features, Netflix is also experimenting with a Rs 299 Mobile+ Plan that will allow users to access HD content on a single screen. You can read more about that here.