THE DAYS of sharing your Netflix account with friends and family outside your own household are over in Spain. The streaming giant has just launched new restrictions that will mean that members will be much more strictly controlled when it comes to using the service.
‘Today, over 100 million households are sharing accounts – impacting our ability to invest in great new TV and films,’ explained the company’s product innovation director, Chengyi Long, in a press release to explain the decision. ‘So over the last year, we’ve been exploring different approaches to address this issue in Latin America, and we’re now ready to roll them out more broadly in the coming months.’
The result is a new system that is now in force not just in Spain, but also Canada, New Zealand and Portugal, and which will see users obliged to set a primary location. Anyone in that household will be able to use the account.
For other users of the account who are outside the household, they can transfer their profile to a new account, meaning they won’t lose their viewing history, watch list or personalised recommendations.
Users will still be able to access their account when they are travelling, as well as having the option to add extra members for people they don’t live with. This option will cost €5.99 a month per profile in Spain.
This will, however, only be available for those with a standard plan (one extra member) or premium plan (two extra members).
Users in Spain currently have the four options for Netflix subscriptions in the table above. The monthly fees are: €5.49 for basic with ads; €7.99 for basic; €12.99 for standard; and €17.99 for premium.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, news of the changes were not received very well by users on social media sites. In fact, thanks to rumoured changes to the way Twitter will work – including limits to the number of tweets per day for those not paying for the Twitter Blue service – ‘Netflix y Twitter’ was trending on the network on Thursday in Spain.
‘It’s a beautiful day to stop using Netflix and Twitter,’ wrote one user in response to the changes.
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