When will Netflix stop password sharing? (It might be sooner than you’d think)

Netflix announced last October that they would be cracking down on account and password sharing and introduced their intended strategy of charging additional profiles as sub-accounts, but did not say what the timeline for that change would be.

But in a letter to shareholders dated Jan. 19, the streamer announced that while the new ad-supported platform had enjoyed a successful rollout, they “expect to roll out paid sharing more broadly later in Q1 ’23.” While Netflix’s official terms of use have always included language prohibiting the sharing of passwords outside a household, the practice has been tolerated for years and only recently has Netflix begun experimenting with ways to limit account use to the one designated household.

Their first attempts to limit sharing in South America hasn’t been terribly well-received, but that isn’t going to stop Netflix from trying to find a way to enforce its terms of service and recover some potentially lost revenue.

How will Netflix end password sharing?

According to a recent techradar article, Netflix will use IP and MAC address tracking to determine whether an account’s login information is being shared beyond the one allowed household, and the blinders the service has traditionally worn with regards to VPN use may come off once the new policy against account and password sharing has been fully implemented.

An article in Variety outlining the South American trial runs of the new policy mentioned that Standard and Premium plan accounts would be able to add additional users for a cost lower than a new full account, and each sub-account would have its own watch list and password, offering viewers a way to continue watching without having to pay full price for the privilege.

Since last October, Netflix has allowed users to transfer their already-created profile to a new sub-account. It seems the streamer is hoping that by making account conversions easy, they can entice more people to pay an extra few bucks and not risk losing access entirely once the password sharing crackdown is in full effect later this spring.