Netflix surprised the world this week, saying it plans to finally address the rampant practice of password sharing.
More than 100 million households are using a shared password, Netflix said on Tuesday, including 30 million in the U.S. and Canada.
But the video streamer doesn’t plan to simply freeze those shared accounts. Instead, the company will likely favor the setting of an extra fee for those accounts being used by multiple people outside of the home.
Netflix’s plan to capture that lost revenue would start with an alert being sent to account holders whose passwords are being used by other households.
The company has already started a test of this feature in Peru, Costa Rica and Chile. For accounts that are sharing a password across addresses, Netflix is charging an additional fee to add “sub accounts” for up to two people outside the home. The pricing is different per country — about $2.13 per month in Peru, $2.99 in Costa Rica, and $2.92 in Chile, based on current exchange rates.
The company also allows people who use a shared password to transfer their personalized profile information to either a new account or a sub-account, allowing them to keep their viewing history and recommendations.
