Sharing logins for online TV and movie services has become a way of lfe but many – but cable firms want it to end.
Twitter and Facebook often see users asking for a login to watch a show or sporting event, and cable firms say it is costing them billions.
Now they want to limit the number of logins a user has – after finding one with 30,000 people logged in at once.
The TV industry’s losses from password sharing are expected to rise to $9.9 billion by 2021 from $3.5 billion this year, the research firm Parks Associates estimates.
‘There’s lots of extra streams, there’s lots of extra passwords, there’s lots of people who could get free service,’ Tom Rutledge, the chief executive officer of Charter Communications, operates as Spectrum , told a UBS conference this month.
He said one unidentified channel owner had 30,000 simultaneous streams from a single account.
According to Parks Associates, a third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don’t live with,
The TV industry’s losses from password sharing are expected to rise to $9.9 billion by 2021 from $3.5 billion this year, the research firm estimates.
The cable firms say the problem is that pay-TV companies only require users to re-enter their passwords for each device once a year, and many don’t monitor the number of people logged into the same account.
Charter has already asked Viacom, which owns Comedy Central and MTV, to restrict the number of concurrent streams on their apps and force legitimate subscribers to log in more often, according to two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations, said Bloomberg.
Justin Connolly, the executive vice president for affiliate sales and marketing for ESPN and Disney networks told Bloomberg ‘It’s people consuming something they haven’t paid for. It’s piracy’.
HOW WIDESPREAD IS SHARING?
Earlier this year a Reuters/Ipsos poll found more than one-fifth of young adults who stream shows like ‘Game of Thrones’ or ‘Stranger Things’ borrow passwords from people who do not live with them.
Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen and Kit Harington as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones: Many users borrow passwords to watch a specific show,
Twenty-one percent of streaming viewers ages 18 to 24 said they had accessed at least one digital video service such as Netflix Inc, HBO Now or Hulu by using log-in credentials from someone outside their household at some time.
Overall, 12 percent of adults said they did the same thing.
Respondents to the Reuters/Ipsos survey said they borrow passwords to save money on video subscriptions, which can be cheap on their own but add up with multiple services.
Donielle Bradshaw, a live-in nanny in Smyrna, Georgia, said she uses her 28-year-old sister’s password for Hulu, and her 32-year-old brother’s password for Netflix.
‘I feel like since we are family, it’s OK,’ said the 22-year-old Bradshaw, who estimates she watches four hours of shows on weeknights and 10 hours a day on weekends.
If companies cracked down on password sharing, Bradshaw said she would be willing to pay for her own Netflix subscription but is not sure about Hulu, which is owned by several media companies.
Earlier this year Disney announced it is to pull all of its Disney and Pixar movies from Netflix and start its own streaming service, and now it has revealed Star Wars and Marvel movies will follow
‘I binge a lot of shows on Netflix. I don’t think I could do without it,’ she said.
HBO, a unit of Time Warner Inc, actually encourages younger viewers to use its HBO Now and HBO Go services for free by offering it to about 100 U.S. colleges and universities.
‘For us it’s more important that at that age where they are not financially independent quite yet, they are habituating to using the product to ultimately aspiring to becoming paid customers,’ Bernadette Aulestia, executive vice president of global distribution, said in an interview.
Netflix executives also have said they know some viewers share passwords.
‘We could crack down on it, but you wouldn’t suddenly turn all those folks to paid users,’ Netflix Chief Financial Officer David Wells said at a Goldman Sachs conference last September.
Industry analysts say companies are missing a chance to grow revenue.
An analysis by Parks Associates estimated streaming providers will lose $550 million in 2019 from password sharing.
‘There has been this kind of cavalier attitude about it,’ Parks Associates analyst Glenn Hower said. ‘It hasn’t been a priority.’