Netflix is testing a new feature in India called Pause Membership. With this new feature, we can pause your membership for 10 months. If you resume your Netflix subscription within that period, you’ll still have access to all your profiles, ratings, recommendations, viewing history, My List, and saved settings. But after 10 months we will have to start from scratch.
In May this Netflix had started to deactivate accounts that had been dormant for over a year with no streaming activity, in order to prevent subscribers from paying for a service they weren’t using. Before the “Pause Membership” option, the user only has the cancel membership option and restart in between 10 months.
“We’re always working on new ways to improve the Netflix experience. We experiment with these types of tests in different countries for different periods of time – and only make them broadly available if people find them useful,” Netflix said in a statement.
Pause membership options work just like the cancel membership option. This means the change will come into effect at the end of the current billing period. The “pause membership” option is available under “Account” on the website. On clicking the button they will be taken to the confirmation page. On confirming, they will be asked for feedback about the reason for choosing to pause the membership. Later users can ‘resume’ their membership with a single click from the account settings page.
To be honest, this new option doesn’t do anything different than the cancel membership option in terms of functionality. It will only come in effect after the end of the billing period, so won’t let you carry forward the remaining days. I guess it more like analytics for Netflix. Because they may think that now if a user cancels a membership, he/she will never come back while some pause membership there is a good chance that they will come back.
