Enable Netflix Watch Now on more than 3 PCs

Posted on June 9, 2008 at 5:24 am

Netflix Watch Now service is great for steaming movies to your PC via Internet Explorer. If you’ve been using the service for a while, you might have asked yourself how does Netflix prevent people from sharing their login info with family and friends so that everyone can watch movies from free online?

Well, Netflix uses a special code that is assigned to the first three PC’s that you install the Watch Now plugin on. So when you go install it on the 4th PC, you might get an error message saying that the key has been used three times already and now you must call to get a new key.

However, the key is stored in the registry on the Windows machine and can be exported out and then imported into a 4th PC, 5th, or however many you want. You will not be able to use them all at once, but you can at least use ANY of the computers.

Note that the registry keys are specific to the OS, so if you export the key on a Windows XP machine, it won’t work if you import it into a Vista machine. Therefore, you should export one for XP and one for Vista.

Export Netflix Registry Key

First, click on Start and then Run. Type in regedit. In Vista, just type in regedit into the Instant search box.

Now you need to navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Netflix\Movie Viewer\

You should see the ID key in the right hand pane. This is what Netflix uses to ensure that the plugin is running on one of the first three PC’s it was installed onto.

Now make sure to click on the Movie Viewer folder and then click on File and Export. We are just exporting the Movie Viewer key, not anything else.

That’s it! Save it to your hard drive and the Watch Now code is backed up. Make sure that the option for “Selected Branch” is chosen and not “All”.

Now you can go ahead and install the Watch Now plugin onto multiple computers and then import the registry key into each one of those computers. Just open the registry like shown above and click File and then Import. You can now watch movies on as many computers as you like without having to call customer service.

Note that you still cannot stream movies to multiple computers at the SAME time, you can just watch them on more than three computers. Enjoy! Source: Tech-Recipes

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