Netflix wants to roll out paid account sharing more widely ‘later this quarter’
Netflix plans to expand its account sharing feature later this quarter. The streaming service is testing the model in some countries and says it is good enough for wider adoption. It acknowledges that the feature will not be immediately popular and will lead to cancellations.
Although Netflix says in the quarterly figures paid account sharing will continue to be rolled out ‘later in the first quarter’, this does not mean that the revenue model will immediately apply worldwide. The streaming service says it will release this in a ‘staggered’ manner about different ‘sets of countries’. Netflix says the phased release of paid account sharing will take a “few” quarters.
The streaming service now allows customers to share their account with anyone they want, provided the number of simultaneous users is limited. However, Netflix wants to limit this to within a user’s household. To achieve this, the company has been working on features such as profile transfers in recent years. In addition, this subscription is now being tested in certain countries, including Argentina.
“This will not be a popular move and there will be subscribers who are not happy with this,” says new co-CEO Greg Peters about the broader release of paid account sharing. Peters therefore expects that some subscribers will cancel their subscriptions in response. Ultimately, however, Peters expects that this will yield a profit for the company, because people who first ‘piggyback’ on an account will still purchase their own subscription.
The impact of the new advertising subscription is currently small on Netflix’s quarterly figures. 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 for the first time in the past quarter. 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 revenue of $31.6 billion, almost $2 billion more than a year earlier. At $4.5 billion, net income was more than $600 million less than in 2021.