Blockbuster may be completely dead, but they’re laughing at Netflix’s new crackdown on sharing passwords from beyond the grave.
The once-revolutionary video rental chain only has one franchise location, but it looks like their social media team is still up and running based on a tweet Thursday from the company directed at their once-rival.
After months of speculation, it’s official Netflix informed Customers said on Tuesday that accounts will only be shared within a single household. This policy change effectively ends the long practice of friends and family dividing the cost of a single account, often from different parts of the country.
This crackdown on password sharing is a response to the growing and recent competition Loss of new subscribersIt is the company’s first in more than 10 years.
Since its founding in 1997, the company has emerged as a giant among the men in the streaming service and has completely changed the entertainment industry over the past decade with award-winning original content. They have since been joined by services such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and the newly renamed Max.
This boom in streaming came at the expense of Blockbuster, which at its height had over 9,000 sites and 80,000 employees. They suffered huge losses throughout the late 2000s, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2010 and being bought out by Dish Network the following year.
Since 2019, Bend, Oregon, is still home to the last authorized store.
The memo sent by Netflix to members stated that they could transfer the profile of a person outside of their household so they could start their membership on a separate payment plan or pay an additional $7.99 for each person outside of their household using their account.
The company also said 100 million households subscribe to the accounts, which is 43% of its global user base.
