[imagesource: Jenny Chang-Rodriguez]

At present, Netflix pricing in South Africa ranges from R99 to R169 a month.

Split that between two households, with four people watching, and you’re looking at somewhere around R40 a head.

In short, it’s not exactly a bank breaker, whether you’re splitting it or not.

One major plus of sharing a password with your parents, for example, is that you don’t have to help them set up an account.

There’s something you can’t put a price on.

The bad news the headline refers to is that Netflix is testing a new feature aimed at cracking down on the sharing of passwords between houses, reports CNN:

Netflix (NFLX) is rolling out alerts asking users to verify they are authorized to watch on the account to be able to keep watching.

“This test is designed to help ensure that people using Netflix accounts are authorized to do so,” a Netflix spokesperson said in a statement. The company’s terms of service say accounts “may not be shared with individuals beyond your household.”

When a user selects their profile on a shared Netflix account, a pop-up will ask them to verify the account by confirming with a text or email sent to the account holder.

The message which pops up states that “if you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching”.

I mean, it’s not really that much of a problem if you are knowingly sharing passwords, but if you’re using a login from years ago without somebody’s knowledge, getting that verification code will prove tricky.

You can also choose to verify later, much like you can choose to decline WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, but you’ll have to take the plunge at some point.

We should point out that at this stage, the feature is just being tested, and there is no confirmation that it’s going to roll out to the masses any time soon.

So, if you’ve been piggybacking off your sister’s ex-boyfriend’s account, there’s time to come clean.

Netflix reached 200 million users worldwide last month, but you would imagine that number would increase very rapidly if the company found an effective method to prevent password sharing.

[source:cnn]