UH OH

Netflix Hits Streaming’s Third Rail: No More Password-Sharing

With its share price under pressure, streaming giant is looking for ways to shore up customer numbers.

If you’re one of the millions who use somebody else’s Netflix password, you might soon be out of luck. Faced with a falling customer base and a sharp drop in its share price, the streaming giant is looking to shore up its numbers—including cracking down on password-sharing. Netflix announced late Tuesday that it had lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter and was expecting to lose 2 million more by June. The news knocked more than a quarter off the streamer’s market value: Netflix stock was trading at around $253 per share in the pre-open trading after touching a high of $690 last October. The California-based company says an estimated 100 million households around the world rely on borrowed passwords to watch its services. “Those are over 100 million households already are choosing to view Netflix,” CEO Reed Hastings said. “We’ve just got to get paid at some degree for them.” One option, already being trialed in Latin America, is for subscribers to be allowed to extend the service to other households for a discounted price.