Netflix: The streaming service is said to have more than 100 million secret viewers

221.6 million people pay for Netflix - making the service the largest premium streaming service in the world.

For some time now, however, the air at the top has been getting thinner: Netflix's growth is sluggish, alternatives like Disney+ are becoming more attractive.

And in times of rising subscription prices and living costs, some customers might reconsider whether series like »Bridgerton« are really worth up to 18 euros per month.

The new figures show how serious the situation is for Netflix: For the first time in more than ten years, the company announced that its number of customers had fallen in the past quarter.

This is explained with the Ukraine war and the end of 700,000 subscriptions in Russia, but also with the increasing competitive pressure.

And not even Netflix itself considers the development to be a one-off slip: For the current quarter, the company expects to lose another two million subscribers.

The streaming giant is shrinking.

Very slowly, but so unexpectedly that Netflix shares lost more than a quarter of their value after the announcement.

Your corona high seems to be over.

In the course of its growth problems, Netflix is ​​publicizing an issue on which it has long had an ambivalent attitude: the sharing of accounts.

It is not allowed to pass on your own Netflix password to people outside of your own household.

However, the service didn't really care about its own rule for years, the business was growing.

On Tuesday, Netflix outlined the extent of the phenomenon on its platform.

The company therefore assumes that more than 100 million households worldwide watch Netflix without having a subscription themselves.

"They love the service," said CEO Reed Hastings.

"We just have to be paid for it to a certain extent."

There is still no ideal solution for dealing with users who like to log in to third parties but do not take out their own subscriptions.

Of course, providers can try to identify and block them with technical means.

However, there is a risk that they will mess it up with the actual account holders.

In this way, providers could perhaps even lose more than they win - also because without all the secret viewers, fewer people might talk about their films or series.

Julia Alexander, who analyzes the market for Parrot Analytics, recently told me that a push against password sharing could lead to a higher churn rate "than a price increase of a dollar or two every 18 months".

A test run in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru gives an idea of ​​what Netflix could be up to.

The option being tried out there allows subscribers to provide up to two people with whom they do not live together a sub-account of their account – for a surcharge of the equivalent of two to three euros per month.

However, this is still only a local offer.

Incidentally, there are also signs of another change in the company's strategy on the edge of account sharing: As Reed Hastings announced, Netflix is ​​also considering an advertising-financed version of its offer, which thanks to the advertising business could be cheaper than the previous subscriptions.

He promised to consider this for the next one to two years.

Netflix, which has always enticed viewers with series marathons without any commercial breaks, could in future be more reminiscent of traditional television – or of pay channels from the sports sector.

And it could be more interesting for secret viewers who simply could not or did not want to afford their own subscription.

Disney + had previously presented plans for a cheaper subscription offer with advertising financing.

Amazon, meanwhile, is experimenting with a free streaming service to complement its monthly Amazon Prime Video package.

The streaming market is on the move like it hasn't been for a long time.

Let's see who comes out on top at the end of these experiments.

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I wish you a good rest of the week,

Markus Boehm