Netflix plans to expand its account sharing feature later in the quarter. The streaming service is testing the model in some countries and says it’s good enough for wider adoption. It acknowledges that the feature will not be immediately popular and will lead to cancellations.
Although Netflix in the quarterly figures says to continue rolling out paid account sharing ‘later in the first quarter’, this does not mean that the revenue model will immediately go global apply. The streaming service says this ‘ spread out across different ‘sets of countries’. Netflix says the phased release of paid account sharing will take a ‘few’ quarters.
The streaming service now lets customers share their account with whoever they want, provided the number of simultaneous users remains limited. However, Netflix wants to limit this inside a user’s household. To achieve this, the company has been working on features such as porting profiles in recent years. In addition, this subscription is now being tested in select countries, including Argentina.
“This will not be a popular move and there will be subscribers who are not happy about it,” says new co-CEO Greg Peters on expanding paid account sharing. Peters therefore expects that some subscribers will cancel their subscription in response. In the end, however, Peters expects that this will yield profits for the company, because people who first ‘piggyback’ on an account still purchase their own subscription.
The impact of the new advertising subscription is still small on the quarterly figures of Netflix. The company expects this to grow in the coming years. The streaming service says it still has confidence in the subscription based on the experiences of subscribers and advertisers. This subscription is not yet available in the Benelux.
Netflix had more than 230 million subscribers in the past quarter for the first time. The number of subscribers increased by 7.6 million compared to the previous quarter. Sales were $7.85 billion and net income was $55 million. For all of 2022, Netflix had revenues of $31.6 billion, almost $2 billion more than a year earlier. Net income, at $4.5 billion, was more than $600 million less than in 2021.
