Netflix may have talked up the potential revenue stream of a password-sharing crackdown yesterday during its Q1 earnings call, but actually implementing it – that’s another story.
Deadline reports that in a Q&A conducted after with executives, they confirmed they began some light test launches over a year ago and just concluded a first big country test.
A global solution however will take a while to work out the various logistics and so will likely require “a year of iterating and deploying” before it can be fully implemented according to COO Greg Peters.
Peters says the idea isn’t to wipe out password sharing but charge people to do it, and so Netflix will be focusing more on revenue and ‘subscriber accounts’ as opposed to individual subscriber numbers.
When the business was growing fast, a password sharing solution was a low priority. Now though, in the wake of its first quarter of losses in a decade and an overnight stock plunge of 25% in after-market trading (a drop of $40 billion in market value), the streamer needs to get back into investors’ good graces.
It’s estimated 100 million Netflix viewers, including 30 million in the U.S. and Canada, use other people’s passwords to log in – a large number considering there’s a total subscriber base of 222 million.
