Days after Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix announced stepping down from his role as co-chief executive of the company and was replaced by Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, the new company CEOs have revealed details about ending password sharing. In an interview with news agency Bloomberg, Netflix will not sacrifice user experience.
However, the company will check password sharing and do it in a “graduated approach.”
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According to Peters, some of those folks are borrowing because they're more price sensitive, they're less engaged or whatever. But if we deliver a Wednesday every week, if we deliver a Glass Onion every week, we'll get the vast majority of those viewers back, the Bloomberg report added.
He also mentioned that “the vast majority of people who are not paying for Netflix will have to pay for it. It gets to a pretty firm kind of position. This is not gonna be a universally popular kind of event. There will be unhappy customers.”
It should be noted that Hastings' decision to leave Netflix comes even as the company announced a big growth in subscriber numbers at the end of 2022. Hastings said he was leaving Netflix at a time when the company said it has added 7.66 million subscribers in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2022, beating Wall Street estimates of 4.57 million with a big draw coming from "Harry & Meghan" and "Wednesday".
To recall, in October last year, Netflix announced a "Profile Transfer" feature to prevent password sharing. The streamer had said that the new feature has been rolled out to all members globally. The "much-requested" feature allows users to transfer their personalised recommendations, viewing history, My List, saved games, and other preferences to a new account when they start their own membership, the company had said.
Advertising is another focus area for the streaming giant; it introduced an ad-supported tier for its users in November last year. Netflix calls its new ad-supported plan Basic with Ads. It was introduced starting at $6.99 per month in regions like Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Spain and the US.