Netflix unveils profile transfers amid password-sharing crackdown

As it steps up its endeavours to suppress the popular apply of password sharing, Netflix is unveiling a new characteristic that will give users–including those people sharing somebody else’s password–an straightforward way to transfer their profiles to new (and presumably legit) accounts.

Introduced now in a blog site post, Netflix’s new “Profile Transfer” tool allows you export all the important knowledge in your profile–including your “personalized” recommendations, enjoy record, viewing heritage, and saved games–to a new account, presumably your possess.

Netflix expenditures the new Profile Transfer software as a way of navigating “life changes,” these kinds of as individuals that manifest when “people move,” “families develop,” and “relationships conclude.”

But the aspect also comes as Netflix, which just obtained strike with two quarters of declining membership quantities, is having major about cracking down on password sharing.

The new “Transfer Profile” solution, which is continue to rolling out to Netflix members (it hasn’t landed on my individual account however), can be accessed beneath your profile menu on the Netflix web site.

To get started the method, you should enter your email address and generate a new password. Netflix will then transfer your recommendations, viewing historical past, My List, options, and any saved video games to your individual new account.

Netflix

A backup of your profile, minus video game saves, will continue to be on the primary account, and the owner of the first account will get a notification that you are transferring your profile to a new account.

Netflix’s Profile Transfer bulletins by no means mentions the password-sharing brouhaha, alternatively framing the element as a way to “let your Netflix profile be a constant in a existence entire of improvements.”

But one particular of the changes that is coming for Netflix buyers is that the streamer is no extended turning a blind eye towards password sharers.

Stung by not long ago quarterly earnings that element a continual stream of departing subscribers, Netflix has started cracking down on password sharing in earnest.

Again in March, Netflix rolled out the option for account holders in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru to create lowered-priced “sub accounts” for up to two folks they really do not are living with.

In July, Netflix adopted up the “sub account” software with an “add a home” aspect that allows buyers in five Latin American international locations to “buy” additional residences in which they–or another person else–can share the same Netflix account.

Netflix hasn’t discovered any repurcussions for password sharing. But we got a hint of what could possibly be to appear in a check last calendar year, in which the firm questioned some viewers to enter a verification code despatched to the account holder.