Netflix is cracking down password sharing on consumers in India and every other market from today, the world's largest streaming giant said as a limited roll-out of the restriction has already helped the firm to gain almost 6 million subscribers for the quarter that ended on June.

The streaming giant said that it will begin to address account sharing between households in nearly all of its remaining countries starting Thursday. Once a bastion of supporting the practice of account password-sharing, Netflix now finds it poses complex challenges to its business prospects.

It started testing the cap last year, much to the chagrin of many subscribers, and rolled it out to several other countries including Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, and the U.S. in 2023. In a few of the markets above, Netflix was allowing people sharing the password to pay extra for their friends to stay along.

In this regard, the company elaborated that it is not going to introduce another tier of membership for customers in countries where it recently has begun enforcing account sharing restrictions. According to the letter to shareholders, that's because the market penetration remains relatively low in those markets, and there is more affordable tier of subscription in Netflix.

In these markets, we are not offering an add-on member feature because we have just cut the price in a pretty good number of those countries-Indonesia, Croatia, Kenya, and India-and penetration is still quite low in many of those countries, so we've got plenty of runway without having to introduce more complexity. Households that subscribe to Netflix will be able to migrate current profiles to new and existing accounts.

It also publishes rules and exceptions to prevent account sharing outside the household.

The company said Wednesday that Netflix's password-sharing crackdown helped deliver a strong subscriber growth in the quarter ended June. It follows a loss of almost 1 million customers in the same quarter last year when the company said it now gained 5.9 million subscribers. Much of the increase is among individuals who, no longer able to share the service at no cost, have chosen to pay for their own accounts.

The company's revenue growth is "largely driven by our paid sharing rollout," Netflix CFO Spencer Neumann said. That, he added, is its "primary revenue accelerator in the year" and its impact will "build over several quarters.".

The battle against password-sharing is an ongoing saga that may further the challenge of Netflix's competitive edge in many markets. One such market is India where Netflix is faced with heavy competition from JioCinema, a platform being backed by James Murdoch and Mukesh Ambani. JioCinema streams almost all popular shows and movies from NBC, HBO, and Warner Bros. as well as hosts some of the region's most sought-after sporting events. An annual subscription to JioCinema costs about $12.