screen Sharing is caring?

Carden Cappi discusses the controversy of Netflix’s password sharing crackdown

FOR a long time, it was just a rumour, some background noise about how sharing your Netflix password with a person outside your household was illegal. Most people ignored it. But Netflix seemingly has had enough and announced that it would be ending password sharing, with the UK being affected from the end of March 2023 after it has already been introduced in places like South America, Canada, and Spain. Now, people have the option to either pay for their own account or pay an extra fee if they are sharing an account with people outside their household. According to some tech-savvy pages on the internet, Netflix will try to achieve this by accessing location information, meaning that it will track things like IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether all users live in the same household or not.

And yes, on one level it does make sense. The Netflix terms state that sharing passwords outside households is forbidden, and with inflation raging whilst the demand for better productions that cost more money rises, it makes sense that Netflix needs as much profit as possible, especially after the streaming boom of the Covid-19 era is over.

But viewers are hit just as bad, maybe even worse by the current climate, especially university students like me. And while it might be easy to tell people to just cancel their subscription, Netflix is something a lot of us use for escapism, to relax after a long day, or to connect with friends if you all watch the same show and talk about it for hours on end. So while some might decide to pull the plug on their Netflix subscription due to financial reasons, a lot of people will probably stay on Netflix.

Another issue is that most people share their accounts with family members, who techni cally live — or have lived — in the same household. Students, however, live away from home for vast stretches of the year. Is it fair that if you are a household but have to travel or move for specific times of the year you cannot share your Netflix account anymore? And if so, can Netflix expect us to start a new account every year and lose your watchlist if you move houses or have a change in housemates, just so you can share the cost with the people you are living with?

Streaming services are already multiplying faster than one can keep track of, and more and more companies are splitting off from the streaming giants to create their own service, requiring a separate subscription that most people just cannot afford. What if they follow in Netflix’s footsteps? Will there be resistance? Perhaps a massive drop in subscriptions and ultimately the end of some services?

It is impossible to tell. What one can say is that this action will probably lead to an increase in illegal streaming because people don’t want to abstain from streaming, but simply cannot afford to pay for their own accounts.

Arguably, this poses not only a security risk to streamers as a lot of sites might not be safe, but may ultimately cost the companies even more money than they are losing with shared passwords. The future of streaming right now is very hard to assess. On the one hand, people want to be entertained, especially in the horrible current state of the world, but how far can streaming services go with their rules and regulations on sharing accounts?