Sharing is no longer caring when it comes to Netflix passwords

Are you currently signed into someone else's Netflix account?

You're not alone. 

The popular streaming service recently shared that it plans to limit users' ability to share their account with people outside of their household. 

TV and culture journalist Alison Herman joined Elamin Abdelmahmoud to get into what exactly that means, what users can expect, and whether or not this effort is worth all the trouble in the long run.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Listen and subscribe to Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud wherever you get your podcasts.

Alison: Hey, how is it going?

Elamin: Well, I'm doing all right. But you know who's not doing well is all the people on social media who are very upset by the fact that Netflix is going to crack down on all this password sharing. What are the objections? Why would people be upset by Netflix doing this?

Alison: Well, I think people are upset both at the general principle of maybe having to pay for their own account for the first time (and maybe ever).But we also got an interesting preview of how Netflix plans to implement this crackdown on password sharing, and there are some pretty obvious problems and loopholes within that.

Elamin: Let's talk about that. What's the general plan for how they're approaching this?

Alison: So, first of all, we should probably say that the only way we really know about this is that they say they accidentally posted guidelines that are only supposed to apply where they're testing the strategy out in Latin America and a handful of countries. So we haven't really gotten the official Netflix, 'here's the plan' rollout possibly because they saw the reaction. But what they've said is essentially, first of all, they've revealed that their definition of a household is not necessarily your relationship. Say, if you live, in my case, several hundred miles from your parents, who also own your Netflix account, it's a physical household and that they're going to verify that you are in the same household as your other profiles on your account.

Elamin: It's like the census.

Alison: Yes. You're going to have to check in every month with, you know, your supervisor, your Big Brother, your Netflix manager, and every 31 days you're going to have to verify, which people immediately started fact checking: what if I am traveling? Or, what if I have a second home that I regularly spend time in? What if I don't live in the same house as my parents, but we're family? It seems like there's going to be some kinks they're going to need to work out.

Elamin: So this is an entirely big vibe shift from Netflix's position in, say, 2017 when they had this ad campaign that was like, 'love is sharing a Netflix password.' We get to this moment and they're no longer all encouraging of the sharing. What do you think changed?

Alison: Well, I think we have to start with the fact that five years in the lifespan of a big startup disruptor like Netflix is essentially like five lifetimes, so we are in a very different place. And I think the chief difference is that in 2017, for example, Netflix was in a phase of aggressive massive growth. They were adding millions of subscribers per quarter. They were not really worried about how to gain more subscribers because they were on the, sort of, natural upward trajectory. And what happened last year is Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade, two quarters in a row, and suddenly they had to worry about, you know, how do we take these relationships that we've fostered by getting people hooked on the Netflix product, by allowing everyone to share passwords, and how do we turn that into formal, monetizable relationships? How do we get people to put a ring on the Netflix relationship in their life?

Elamin: Right. Netflix says there's 100 million users currently logging into the service through somebody else's password. Their gamble is that those people will say, 'I guess it's time for me to get my own account.' Is that even likely? Is that how it will work?

Alison: I mean, it's exactly as you said. It's a gamble. I mean, the people who are going to angrily huff off and quit are obviously much louder; no one's going to get on Twitter and say, 'oh, well, I guess I'm going to pony up.' But what they're betting is some people are definitely going to quit because of this, and they're going to hope that more people are going to just bite the bullet and pony up.

Elamin: Alison, I know you're not an oracle. Can you guess when this is going to start to take effect?

Alison: I can't put an exact date on it, but I will say that they managed to go from 'we're putting in ads,' something else they said they would never, ever do a few years ago, to ads on the service in six months. So, more quickly than you think.

The whole episode is online as a podcast. Listen and subscribe to Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud wherever you get your podcasts.