Netflix ends in Spain with shared accounts in different houses if an extra is not paid for it

"To love is to share a password," said Netflix from its official Twitter account in March 2017. In recent months, this message has been filled with comments and retweets from users recalling the contradiction into which the red giant has fallen since it began to eliminate the possibility of shared accounts.

On Wednesday it announced that this measure would also be applied immediately in Spain, according to a statement from the platform, as well as in countries such as Portugal, New Zealand and Canada, after having tested it in 2022 in some Latin American markets.

Love is sharing a password.

—Netflix (@netflix) March 10, 2017

If users live in different households in Spain, they cannot share Netflix (nor, therefore, divide the monthly fee among themselves) if they have the basic plan or the basic plan with ads.

Subscribers to the standard or

plans can add "subaccounts" of people they do not live with, one in the first case and two, maximum, in the second.

Each of these subaccounts will have a profile, at an additional cost of 5.99 euros per month per person.

These are the prices and benefits as of February 2023 depending on the plan and the people with whom Netflix is ​​shared:

• Basic with ads: 5.49 euros per month.

• Basic: 7.99 euros per month.

• Standard: 12.99 euros per month (an extra subscriber for 5.99 euros per month).

• Premium: 17.99 euros per month (each extra subscriber for 5.99 euros per month).

Benefits of the different Netflix plans shared by the company in February 2023.Netflix

In the statement, the platform's director of Product Innovation, Chengyi Long, explained that, to make it easier for its users to have "greater control over who can access their account", they must establish the main location of the account through connecting the device or application to an IP address.

This information is not only used for the account owner to have that control.

It is also useful for the company to have.

What if the owner of the account goes on a trip?

Subscribers will be able to watch Netflix on their personal devices or log in to another TV (in a hotel or vacation rental, for example), the platform explains.

If they have a second home or travel frequently to the same location, they should open the Netflix app on their mobile devices while connected to their primary location's Wi-Fi once a month, and then do so when they arrive home. the second location.

More information

Questions and answers about the end of shared accounts on Netflix

“Each Netflix account is designed for a single household, and subscribers can choose from multiple plans with different features,” Long says in his writing.

Despite not having applied it up to now and even having encouraged the contrary in messages such as the 2017 tweet, in reality, the conditions of use when contracting the platform already limited its use to members of the household, commented Natalia Marcos in this questions and answers about the end of shared accounts on Netflix.

As this measure will cause the

of different accounts that until now shared expenses, Netflix allows you to transfer profiles and explains how to do it.

Anyone using a shared account can move their profile to their own paid account, keeping their personalized recommendations, viewing history, their roster, saved games, and more.

The company has not clarified what will happen if these users do not do so and try to continue accessing with the password of the subscription holder.

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Netflix increased its users by 2.4 million in the third quarter of 2022, reversing a first half of the year of subscriber loss.

In this way, it recovered customers in all regions thanks to the summer premieres and just before launching a cheaper rate in 12 countries, the basic rate with ads that also reached Spain.

The company also announced in October that it will continue to explore the video game route.

It is a way of increasing the user's permanence time within the platform.

In just over a year, Netflix had already created 35 titles and another 55 are already in development.

Some of them will be based on their own series and movies in order to feed back their offer and so that both the hours of game consumption and reproductions grow.

Currently, "there are more than 100 million households that share their accounts, which reduces our ability to invest in the creation of great stories, told with series and films of the highest quality," the platform recalled in the statement on Wednesday. .

A report by Barlovento Comunicación estimates that 61.3% of Spanish Netflix users share a subscription.

In March,

reported the estimate made by the financial analyst company Cowen & Co. according to which Netflix could make $1.6 billion in profits a year by charging a bonus for sharing an account.

The calculations assumed that half of those who have access to Netflix now but do not pay would choose to pay, and half of them would do so with their own subscription.

In other words, if the customers who share an account do not pay their subscription, they will not be able to enjoy new seasons of content such as

or

.

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