The days of friends and family all using the same Netflix account may soon be over as the streaming giant began testing a new measure designed to clamp down on password sharing.
Instead of being able to access content from anywhere provided you have the login, the trial 'add a home' feature will ask users to cough up a fee if they want to watch from a new location.
This system means users will only be able to view episodes in one household unless they pay the additional fee, with people on certain plans able to add more homes than others.
It's especially bad news for fans in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, where the feature will launch next month.
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IP addresses, Device IDs and other network data will be used to check where people are rather than GPS technology, the company says.
Netflix ’s director of product innovation, Chengyi Long, in a statement: "It’s great that our members love Netflix movies and TV shows so much they want to share them more broadly"
"But today’s widespread account sharing between households undermines our long term ability to invest in and improve our service."
It's the latest effort by US-based Netflix to recoup costs from consumers amid a downturn and falling revenues at the company.
The company is expecting a loss of 2 million subscribers for the second financial quarter of 2022, with investors said to be bracing themselves for a fall in value as a result.
They pledged to begin introducing some form of charge for password sharing after recording a subscription decline of 200,000 in April.
But a test run of a similar crackdown measure in Latin America earlier this year appeared to be a flop, as the company was forced to define what exactly it regards as a 'household'.
Users in the test regions of Peru, Chile and Costa Rica blasted Netflix after a system asked them to pay an extra $2 to $3 when sharing their log-in details.
But after confusion over whether a household included family living in different locations, Netflix clarified that a household could only be classed as ‘exclusively people a subscriber lives with'.
Many continued to give out their passwords without paying the charge or being detected, and one anonymous Peruvian customer service representative even admitted to doing this herself despite the change in policy.
