The Netflix profile transfer feature hints at an upcoming crackdown on account sharing

Netflix announced a new feature called Profile Transfer, which allows users to move their personalized recommendations, viewing history, My List, saved games and other settings to a new account.

Netflix touts this feature as an easy way for users to switch to a new account if their life circumstances change and they can’t or no longer want to share an account with someone else in the same household. From Media Release:

People are moving. Families are growing. The relationship is over. But during these life changes, your Netflix experience should stay the same. Today, we’re launching Profile Transfer, a feature that allows people who use your account to transfer a profile — saving personalized recommendations, watch history, My List, saved games and other settings — when they start their membership.

As The Verge notes, it’s not hard to deduce an ulterior motive for the profile transfer, given the company’s intention to crack down on account sharing. The feature walks users through the process of starting a new Netflix account from an existing profile, which they’ll likely have to do once Netflix starts restricting access to subscribers who share the same household.

Netflix said in April that it lost subscribers in the first quarter of the year, the first subscriber loss for Netflix in more than a decade. Netflix lost 200,000 subscribers and expects to lose another two million in the second quarter.

The subscriber loss is partly attributed to account sharing, with Netflix estimating that 222 million paying households share with an additional 100 million non-monetized households.

Netflix started testing an additional payment for those who share their Netflix accounts with people outside their household in March. In Netflix’s current test markets of Chile, Costa Rica and Peru, customers can pay an additional fee to share their accounts with two people outside their household.

When the test was launched, Netflix said it was working to “understand the usefulness of these two features” before making changes in other countries. First of all, Profile Transfer has been in testing since March in the same three countries, and now it’s expanding more widely. Other monetization-oriented features are expected to follow.