One benefit of joining a subscription service is that a lot of them now allow you to share your account with friends and family without compromising your privacy. One of the first services to offer this was Netflix, but now there are quite a few that will allow you to share the love and more importantly, the cost.
Amazon – Prime Video
Many of us share our Amazon Prime accounts to help spread the cost and help out family and friends. The downside to this until recently is that the other people using it would mess up your viewing mojo by replacing all your popular suggestions and recently watched programmes with theirs automatically. But now (finally!), Amazon has introduced the ability to add user profiles and you can even have up to six of them. The profiles contain their own separate viewing progress and are effectively free additional accounts!
To benefit from this service, just go to Prime Video in your browser and select ‘Who’s Watching’ (underneath ‘My Stuff’ in the app), then click ‘Add New’ to create a new user. You can then use this same menu to switch between accounts.
TIP – There’s a handy kid’s profile option. This will limit all content to only that recommended for under 12s and does not allow purchases.
Netflix
Netflix have offered multiple profiles for seven years now, but it has recently added in a PIN protection feature. This means when you are confronted with the start screen and various user profiles, you won’t be able to select any old one without knowing the pin code for it. The main benefit to this is that it will stop other users from seeing what you’ve been watching recently.
To activate your PIN protected log-in, just visit your Netflix account on your browser (www.netflix.com/YourAccount) , then click the dropdown arrow for your profile, select ‘change’ next to ‘profile lock’ and enter your account password. Then just select ‘require pin’ and choose your four numbers.
TIP – To stop autoplay when you’re browsing Netflix, you just need to visit the area where you manage your profile and untick both boxes.
Disney+
Each user can also choose from hundreds of different character avatar pictures to use, meaning you can be the lead from your favourite Disney creation.
Each user can also choose from hundreds of different character avatar pictures to use, meaning you can be the lead from your favourite Disney creation.
Shopping – Amazon Prime
You can create a similar set-up to Prime Video using your Amazing Prime shopping account. Prime shopping subscribers can add another adult to their ‘household’, allowing free one day delivery as well as other perks such as a different delivery address. This means you pay for one account but both get Prime Video and photo storage among other things.
What’s great about sharing a Prime account under the household facility is that you can have separate payment methods and you can’t see each other’s purchase history – fantastic for any birthday surprises you may want to keep hidden.
TIP – You can choose to share a payment method, ideal for couples using a joint bank account, for example.