by Thinus Ferreira
Netflix has started to roll out the video streaming service's password crackdown in South Africa as part of its ongoing plans to try and convert content leechers globally to content payers.
In its latest quarterly report, Netflix noted that its password crackdown initiative it first started to test last year, is now truly going global since this week.
Netflix started its password crackdown - a process it calls "paid sharing" - across South American countries like Chile, Costa Rica and Pery last year, and followed it up in February this year by expanding it to Canada, Portugal, New Zealand, Spain and since May in the United States.
Now it will be rolled out to virtually every other country Netflix is available in.
Netflix says it netted an additional 6 million subscribers in the quarter at the end of June and that a lot of the additional new subscribers are people it managed to convince to switch to pay for their own Netflix accounts after having borrowed and used the login details of family and friends.
Netflix's big rival in South Africa, MultiChoice, started its own password crackdown initiative in March last year by suddenly limiting DStv subscribers to just one online watch stream from an account.
This move which was beset with technical problems was met with heavy criticism and backlash by DStv subscribers with MultiChoice that later last year said it was working on some corrections and changes. By mid-2023 no changes to the single concurrent DStv stream has yet been announced or implemented.
Netflix uses a combination of checking for IP addresses and device ID details to determine whether various Netflix account logins are coming roughly from the same location, meaning the same household.
In its Q2 quarterly report, Netflix notes that it will now be expanding its password crackdown initiative to "almost all" of its remaining countries, saying that "we're rolling out paid sharing to almost all of the remaining countries".
