Netflix brings password-sharing crackdown to India: Heres how this will change your experience

If you were sharing your Netflix password with your friends and family, well you would no longer be able to do that. Starting today, Netflix is enforcing a password-sharing limit for users in India and all other markets, the company has announced.

In the past, Netflix has supported password sharing but now the company sees it as a challenge to its future growth. The company said that the restriction on password sharing, which was implemented in some countries, helped it gain 5.9 million subscribers in the quarter that ended in June.

When did the crackdown start

Netflix started testing restrictions on password sharing in 2022 and widened it to several other nations such as Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain and the US in 2023. It even offered an option to pay more to include friends in some of these markets.

How Netflix password crackdown works

The streaming giant will start addressing password sharing in the remaining countries including India starting today. There is still no clarity on how the company will enforce this but various report available online suggest that the company could use a mix of OTP and location-based login. Subscribers can be asked to set up their primary location to use Netflix as the company’s plans page says “Only people who live with you may use your account”.

What adds to the overall confusion is that the company says that the password sharing crackdown will affect people “outside their household in India”. “A Netflix account is for use by one household. Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are — at home, on the go, on holiday — and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Netflix plans in India still support login from up to four devices but the Netflix’s terms and condition page was last updated on January 5, 2023, so we still don’t know how things will change once the crackdown starts. 

India will not get an extra member feature

Netflix has said that it will not offer an extra member feature for users in countries where it is starting to enforce restriction on password sharing. The company said this is because these markets have fewer Netflix customers and cheaper subscription plans. 

“In these markets, we’re not offering an extra member option given that we’ve recently cut prices in a good number of these countries (for example, Indonesia, Croatia, Kenya, and India) and penetration is still relatively low in many of them so we have plenty of runway without creating additional complexity. Households borrowing Netflix will be able to transfer existing profiles to new and existing accounts,” Netflix said in a letter to its investors.

The company reported a gain of 5.9 million subscribers, after losing almost 1 million customers in the same period last year. This growth is mostly because of people who, after being blocked from using the service for free, have decided to buy their own accounts.

“We had paid net additions of 5.9M for Q2’23 (with over 1M paid net adds in each region) vs. -1.0M in Q2’22 as we successfully rolled out paid sharing to more than 100 countries (representing over 80% of our revenue),” Netflix said in the letter.