Netflix: thousands of subscribers cancel in protest against price increase, password sharing rules

Uh oh. The day that we’ve all been dreading has finally arrived. After several months of testing, Netflix’s new password sharing crackdown technology has been rolled out - and subscribers are already cancelling their subscriptions en masse.

Netflix has been threatening to crackdown on password sharing for years, and they’ve finally worked out how. Gone are the days of being able to run a single Netflix account on several devices, regardless of their location. Now, each account will have what’s known as a primary household. Essentially, that’s whoever pays the Netflix subscription fee. Their home location is now linked to the account. If you want to continue password sharing, you’ll need to have ‘checked in’ at that address once every 31 days.

Ahsoka debuts on Disney Plus this August and yes, you can share your password.

That could in theory work if the device you’re using is a laptop, for example. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to take your laptop round your partners/parents/friends once a month to ‘check in’ and stay connected to the account if you visit often anyway. If you watch Netflix through a TV though but aren’t the primary account holder, you’re hardly going to lug your TV round once a month just to connect to the primary WiFi.

If it’s not feasible for you to connect your device to the primary account holder’s WiFi once a month, you have one other option. You can pay an extra monthly fee to add a second location to the account, otherwise you risk losing access. In fact, Netflix is already blocking users who aren’t primary account holders. As you can imagine though, after years of access, subscribers aren’t happy at the prospect of paying a new extra fee, so many are cancelling their subscriptions.

Twitter user GetMerty wrote, “Time to cancel Netflix. Nobody is paying you more to share a password bestie,” while Kimmyjsb added, “Bold of Netflix to assume I’m not going to cancel my membership after sending me the ‘Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with - your household’ email.” HeartlessJackie added, “I don’t even share my Netflix account but I still want to cancel my account since they decided to be dickheads.”

The new rules do seem rather harsh. What about students who are temporarily away from home for a semester? Couples who haven’t yet had the chance to move in together? It’ll be interesting to see if there’s a U-turn on this.