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Netflix's free account password sharing is about to ring a bell. After a relatively long period of testing various forms of restrictions, this streaming giant officially announced to its shareholders that in the first quarter of this year it is ready to introduce fees for sharing passwords and thus put an end to breaking the rules of the service for good, thereby losing a lot of money. So if you also share a password with someone, be prepared for fees. 

Although the introduction of password sharing fees for people outside the household may seem absurd at first glance, Netflix's numbers speak for themselves. According to its findings, out of the 222 million paying households, there are another 100 million households that watch Netflix content only because they have access to a paid account. These households do not meet Netflix's conditions and are therefore de facto watching its content illegally, which is why the company is losing a lot of money. The solution will be a password sharing fee, which will be charged based on IP addresses, device IDs and account activity. In other words, Netflix will apparently first get a picture of where the user's homeland is and what their main device is, and based on this, it will then be able to "catch" users who watch content from the user's account in bulk outside their address. The words "in bulk" are important, however, because it seems that Netflix will only go after really active viewers, at least initially. So if you share Netflix with someone and they watch it sporadically, or if you watch it primarily at home and want to watch it once in a while, for example chatIf you are watching a video dozens of kilometers from your home from a device from which you do not normally watch it, a fee will probably not be required, at least initially. 

At the moment, question marks also hang over how high the fee will actually be. When testing in Latin America, Netflix set it to around $3, but in the US it is said to cost up to $6,99. In both cases, however, this is not a downright negligible amount, although it is more or less clear that Netflix will definitely not go below the tested $3. So, will you remain loyal to him despite the introduction of a similar innovation? 

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