However, unlike for other countries, the streamer is not rolling out the paid sharing option in India.
Netflix will end account sharing in India and other markets like Indonesia, Croatia, and Kenya starting July 20.
“Beginning today, we’ll start to address account sharing between households in almost all of our remaining countries,” the company announced in its Q2 earnings report.
It will soon be sending an email to members who are sharing Netflix outside their household in India announcing this move.
“A Netflix account is for use by one household. Everyone living in that household can use Netflix wherever they are — at home, on the go, on holiday — and take advantage of new features like Transfer Profile and Manage Access and Devices,” it states in its blog post.
However, unlike for other countries, the streamer is not rolling out the paid sharing option in India, a feature that allow users to pay an extra fee to continue sharing their Netflix account with people they don’t live with.
The streamer explains that they had recently cut prices in India and a few other markets, and the penetration is still relatively low, giving the company “plenty of runway without creating additional complexity”.
Households borrowing Netflix will be able to transfer existing profiles to new and existing accounts.
In December 2021, Netflix had reduced the prices of its service in India. In April 2023, it said that the move had helped the company grow engagement in India by nearly 30 percent year-on-year (YoY). Meanwhile the revenue growth increased to 24 percent in 2022 versus 19 percent in 2021.
Netflix has been focussing on tackling account sharing among households for sometime now. In May, it expanded paid sharing to over 100 countries and the move has paid off well for the company. Revenue in each region is now higher than pre-launch, with sign-ups exceeding cancellations.
“The cancel reaction was low and while we’re still in the early stages of monetisation, we’re seeing healthy conversion of borrower households into full paying Netflix memberships as well as the uptake of our extra member feature. We are revenue and paid membership positive vs. prior to the launch of paid sharing across every region in our latest launch,” it stated.
Netflix added 5.9 million paid members in the second quarter of 2023, as compared to losing nearly one million members in the same quarter last year. The service’s overall subscriber base stood at 238.4 million subscribers for the quarter. Its revenue rose to $8.2 billion, a 3% rise from the same period last year. It has $1.5 billion in profit this quarter, a similar number to last year at this time.
It expects revenue growth to accelerate in the second half of the year when it will “see the full benefits of paid sharing plus continued steady growth in its ad-supported plan.”
Its ad tier subscribers has nearly doubled since Q1, yet it’s still a small membership base, so current ad revenue isn’t significant for Netflix. Brands can also now target media buys on the Top 10 content.
“Building an ads business from scratch isn’t easy and we have lots of hard work ahead, but we’re confident that over time we can develop advertising into a multi-billion dollar incremental revenue stream,” it stated.
In a bid to draw more subscribers to its ad-supported tier, Netflix has removed its basic plan in the US and UK, which allowed users to watch shows and movies without commercials.
