It's just a test. For now.
Illustration: Martin Gee If you’ve recently moved out of your parents’ home and expected to keep sharing a Netflix log-in ad infinitum, we have grim news. The largest paid streaming service in the business has decided that its 221 million subscriber accounts are not enough. Netflix decided March 16 that its latest streaming-wars battlefront would be password sharing.
Asserting that Netflix’s existing profile options have “created some confusion about when and how Netflix can be shared,” the blog post outlines a test in the next few weeks of two new so-called “features” for members in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru: The option to add a “sub account” that you have to pay extra for and alternately the ability to transfer profiles to a new account, which would retain your algorithm-juicing history.
To be fair, this is just a test. For now. Netflix doesn’t always widely implement the functionalities that they test. And the current cost of adding a subaccount is not terribly high: In Costa Rica, the charge is $3 a month atop the country’s existing Netflix subscription tiers, which start at $9. It’s also not unexpected given that streaming growth across the board is slowing and the company tested an account verification feature almost exactly a year ago.