This comes after Netflix in May, started rolling out a ban on password sharing worldwide.
The company, however, will not offer the ‘extra member’ option in these countries as it has recently cut prices in many of them. The feature allows subscribers to add an additional member to their account by paying extra.
The users who are part of ‘Netflix Household’, meaning the ones who are using the same internet connection, will be allowed to access the account.
“Beginning today, we’ll start to address account sharing between households in almost all of our remaining countries. 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,” the company said in a letter to its shareholders.
Netflix said borrowing users will be able to transfer their current profile to new and existing accounts.
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The company had launched cheaper plans with ads in November last year before cracking down on password sharing in May this year. The streaming service said the advertising tier is still a very small part of its membership base and the current ad revenue is not material. Netflix’s advertising tier is fairly new to the market, compared to its rival Hulu, which has been supporting ads on the streaming platform for 15 years. Hulu has roughly 30 million subscribers who pay for its ad-supported tier.
The streaming service had cut down its prices in India in December 2021 to Rs 149 a month from Rs 199 a month, for its mobile only plan, and its Standard HD plan supporting two concurrent screens to Rs 499 a month from Rs 649 a month. Netflix remains to be the most expensive streaming service in India.
In an interaction with ET in March, Netflix India VP Monika Shergill said that the company saw a 30% rise in total viewing hours, while its revenue rose 25%, year over year.
The streaming pioneer, which announced its results for the April-June quarter on Wednesday, added 5.9 million new subscribers during the period.
The company reported diluted earnings-per-share of $3.29 for the second quarter, ahead of the $2.86 consensus forecast of analysts surveyed by Refinitiv.
Its nearly 6 million subscriber additions outpaced the 1.9 million that Wall Street expected. Netflix had a total of 238.4 million subscribers worldwide as of the end of June.
Quarterly revenue climbed 2.7% from a year earlier to $8.2 billion, shy of analyst forecasts of $8.3 billion.
