A winning bet since the end of account sharing on Netflix? 📺

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The end of sharing has a bright future ahead of it on Netflix. According to data from Antenna, cited by the Wall Street Journal, the VOD (Video on Demand) service recorded a spike in sign-ups in the four days following the blocking of account sharing in the US at the end of May.

Subscribers rush to get an account 💲

Netflix had been preparing to block account sharing for almost a year, and its implementation has been dazzling. In concrete terms, users who connect to the account from a network other than the home network find themselves blocked. The company then suggests that a maximum of two « freeloaders » pay 5.99 euros to continue accessing the account.

This unpopular measure carries its own risks, as account sharing (see our article on the subject) was also a way for some users to split the bill. Its discontinuation could therefore lead to account closures in an ultra-competitive ecosystem (Amazon Prime, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max…), as Netflix itself had acknowledged to its investors. However, Antenna notes that for the time being, the number of new registrations far exceeds the number of account closures.

Source: Antenna

A bet to be confirmed over the long term 🎯

However, it’s still too early to confirm that Netflix’s gamble will pay off in the long term, even if it has already worked in the short term in Canada and the USA. Around 100 million households around the world use the accounts of family members or friends free of charge, a practice that Netflix has known and tolerated until now.

The company needs to confirm this increase in subscribers in order to regain stability. Indeed, it experienced a growth crisis at the start of 2022, marked by the first net loss of subscribers in its history. This setback was severely punished by the markets, and Netflix’s share price collapsed by over 60% in six months, until the end of June 2022, before recovering at the end of the year. Faced with the emergence of powerful, diversified competition, and with a subscriber cap being reached in the United States, the platform needed to find new growth drivers.

The company therefore stepped up testing of its account-sharing restriction strategy in Latin America and Canada. These tests validated the initiative, which was then extended to Netflix’s main markets, with success… for now.

Do you think that this resurgence of subscribers will have the same impact on all households?

Sources: Antenna, AlloForfait