Being the best streaming service to watch movies and TV shows using the internet, Netflix has been around for a while. If you are living in the US, UK or any country where the cable TV is priced pretty high, you might be a Netflix user who depends on the service to keep up with the favorite series or newly released movies. As a cheap service to keep watching several types of entertainment pieces, Netflix is very popular in European and America countries, not so less, in the rest of the world as well.
So, if you own a Netflix account, you might wanna know about sharing it with someone else in your family or friends. With good intentions of sharing your Netflix account with your Dad or Mom living in the same house is not a big problem. Purchasing separate accounts for each of the family members is not an ideal solution as well. Especially if you are watching it in your own device such as a smartphone instead of television where everyone can sit around in front of it and enjoy the show.
In this article, we are going to breakdown all your questions about sharing your Netflix account and how to do it safely without getting banned from Netflix. There have been several policy changes to the Netflix account sharing in the past to limit the drastic sharing of the accounts between people without purchasing a subscription. So, before we start, let us warn you about it. We never recommend sharing your Netflix credentials to people who live outside of your city or even friends who don’t have a Netflix account. If you do, you may end up in the blacklist and your account may get banned as soon as they figure it out.
Can I share Netflix Account?
The simple answer is YES. You can share your Netflix account with a limited number of people. By sharing what we mean is that the people can access your account using your credentials and browse through the movies. But watching it simultaneously at the same time is a completely different thing. In order to watch the movies or TV shows on 2 or more devices, you should at least have the Standard Netflix plan (more details in the next section.) So, technically, you can share your credentials with your family members and they can get access to your Netflix account.
So, basically this means that you can share the Netflix username and password with as many people as you want (if you want to), and all of them can access the service but won’t be able to enjoy the actual benefit of Netflix which is watching the videos. For example, let’s say, you have the basic plan which only allows 1 connection at a time. If your friend whom you have shared your credentials with is already watching something on Netflix, when you try to watch something yourself, Netflix will return an error saying that the connection is already being used by someone else. This happens to any user who tries to watch something on Netflix with the same credentials which are already being used by someone with the password.
While sharing the passwords with someone else that you do not have a close relation (which we do not recommend), keep in mind that any activity that they do on the account will be on you. Which means, whoever uses your account, you will be responsible for anything that happens inside the account using your credentials. So, we strongly recommend you to keep your credentials to yourself and to only share it with the close family members or friends whom you trust.
To How many people?
Like I already mentioned in the previous section, there is no technical limitation to the number of people that you can share your account password with (because it is all up to you.) But there is a limitation for the screens you can watch Netflix on at the same time. It is based on the plan you are going for, as you can see in the plan chart given below.
As you many have already found out, the Mobile and Basic plans won’t allow more than a single screen at a time. While the Standard plan provides 2 simultaneous connections at the same time. The Premium plan allows up to 4 users to use the service simultaneously.
Will I get banned?
As of now, there are no banning methods followed by Netflix unless in some extreme cases. However, recently, the company has taken steps to prevent the unauthorized use of the same account because of the users sharing their credentials to many users. This might be a turning point in limiting the wide usage of the service without purchasing a subscription plan. So, this will be bad news for those who share their accounts with a lot of users for them to watch Netflix without paying for the service.
What should I do?
We recommend you to not share the accounts with anyone else than your family members living in your house. By default, Netflix allows sharing account to up to 5 people and 4 simultaneous connections. So, try to stick with that and to not do anything sneaky to cheat the system. It will ensure that your account stays safe forever and you can enjoy the fun of Netflix forever.
How to share?
Now that you know you can share your Netflix account with your family members. How to do it? Just share the password with your family members and let them access Netflix from whatever device they prefer. Either it’s a smartphone or a TV placed in individual rooms, Netflix is smart enough to keep separate watching profiles for each one of those devices without interfering with one another. So the video suggestions and watchlists will be completely separate for every device that uses the same Netflix account.
But, for that to happen, you should purchase a plan that allows multiple connections and streaming on multiple devices simultaneously.
