MY DAUGHTER CAN NO LONGER USE OUR NETFLIX ACCOUNT

Question

We have had a Netflix account that my wife and two kids use. However, my daughter has gone to college in the Netherlands and recently received a communication from Netflix stating she can no longer use our account and has to set up her own account. They seem to suggest that the account refers to one location only. As my son will probably be going to college in Poland in the coming months, l’m sure he will be in the same boat. Any advice greatly appreciated.

— Joe Kelly

Answer

I’m afraid you’re seeing the muchdiscussed crackdown on sharing passwords that Netflix has been talking about for years but which finally happened throughout 2023. In essence, they’re reminding you that a Netflix account is supposed to be for a physical household, not an extended family split over multiple households. There is an exception for people travelling abroad for holidays, but the rule appears to be that if your daughter’s device hasn’t logged on using your household’s home wifi in the last 31 days, it’s assumed not to be part of your household and therefore liable to require a new, fully separate account, or an add-on account to yours for €5 per month extra on your bill. If you choose this latter option, they get to pick their username and password, but you pay their (discounted) Netflix account bill. You can’t do this, though, if you’re getting your Netflix as part of some other deal such as within your monthly Sky bill. And it’s not just Netflix, by the way. Last week, Disney announced that it was about to do exactly the same thing with Disney Plus. It will start restricting passwordsharing in June, completing the crackdown by the end of the year. It has said that, like Netflix, it will offer an ‘add-on’ type of account for those who want to be tacked on to the original household account, such as that of a college student living outside the home. Like Netflix, it’s likely that the person paying whatever the add-on fee is (probably around €5) will be the original household account holder, because that disincentivises whole estates from just having €5 accounts in their own name, rather than one house being saddled with a bigger bill. There is pretty sound economic logic to this, by the way, from the streamers’ perspective. Netflix found that its password-sharing crackdown worked a treat, with far more accounts created than those leaving the platform.