Netflix Adds 5 Individual Profiles To Each Account

Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) is now offering personalized profiles for different members using the same account.

Starting Thursday, subscribers to Netflix are now able to create up to five individual profiles for different family members or friends who may be using the same account, Bloomberg reports. These profiles will save taste preferences and recommendations, ensuring that dad’s favorite war movies no longer get recommended to his daughter, who would prefer to watch “My Little Pony.”

All of the individual profiles can be accessed on the same $7.99 monthly subscription plan.

“It’s all about finding the right choices for each person to watch,” chief products officer Neil Hunt explained to Bloomberg. “Most members, including people in a family, have pretty different tastes.”

While some might think that the new Profiles service is designed to address account sharing, a practice where people who do not live together all use the same account in violation of Netflix’s terms, Hunt says that isn’t the case. In fact, the company hardly seems to care about account sharing at all.

"Our intent is to make the family experience great, we've not been too worried with the phenomenon of account sharing," Hunt told CNET in an interview.

Netflix offered a similar service years before, allowing users to sort their DVD rental queues by users. At the time, Netflix was still mostly a DVD delivery service and had only recently launched its online streaming components that would come to define the service. Ultimately, Netflix abandoned its profiles for new customers in 2010, though long-time users can still sort their DVD queues this way.

Now that profiles have been reintroduced for Netflix’s users, Hunt says the company isn’t likely to do away with the feature any time in the near future.

"With a feature like profiles where consumers invest a lot, you can't take it away," he told CNET. "We didn't want to introduce something that we might have to change or take away."