Streaming Services Reckon With Password-Sharing 'Havoc' (hollywoodreporter.com) 150
In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. From a report: On Dec. 9, Charter Communications CEO Tom Rutledge took aim at the "content companies" entering the direct-to-consumer streaming business. The cable executive told a roomful of investment bankers in Manhattan that these new streamers are "creating havoc in the ecosystem." Rutledge wasn't talking about the proliferation of content or the fight to secure exclusive deals with talent. He was targeting the lax security and rampant password sharing that's prevalent across the streaming landscape. "Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams," Rutledge added. "There are more streams available than there are homes to use them." Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that will rise to $12.5 billion in 2024, according to data released by research firm Parks Associates.
For now, many streamers -- including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime -- seem content to allow the practice to continue, even while they crack down on illicit password sales. But as services mature, priorities will likely change. "When the growth starts to flatten and you start to look at the balance sheet, you are going to be looking for revenue," says Jean-Marc Racine, chief product officer of video delivery and security firm Synamedia. The company (which counts Disney, Comcast and AT&T among its clients) conducted a study of two anonymous video providers and said Jan. 6 that it found they were losing more than $70 million annually from password sharing.
For now, many streamers -- including Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon Prime -- seem content to allow the practice to continue, even while they crack down on illicit password sales. But as services mature, priorities will likely change. "When the growth starts to flatten and you start to look at the balance sheet, you are going to be looking for revenue," says Jean-Marc Racine, chief product officer of video delivery and security firm Synamedia. The company (which counts Disney, Comcast and AT&T among its clients) conducted a study of two anonymous video providers and said Jan. 6 that it found they were losing more than $70 million annually from password sharing.
Bogus (Score:4, Insightful)
... Password sharing has serious economic consequences. In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing, and that will rise to $12.5 billion in 2024 ...
That's assuming the "thieves" would actually pay for the service if they didn't get it for "free". In actuality, this number is a big fat ZERO.
Re: Bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
If I couldn't share it with my parents, I'd cancel it since I don't watch it that much. So it would be lost revenue for Netflix.
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Re: Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Password stealing is one thing, but these infrastructure companies need to stop complaining and STFU about bandwidth.
You're already paying for all that bandwidth. Yet they managed to convince FCC to let them double-dip for the same bandwidth, and get paid by the streamers, too.
Back when, Netflix publicly showed how Verizon (for just one example) already had the infrastructure built to handle Netflix, but would not turn in on, in order to create an artificial "shortage" of bandwidth, so they could weasel more money out of the streaming company.
Pretty much like the fake "oil shortages" in the 70s.
Cable and mobile are very dishonest industries, and there's too much "industry capture" in government.
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I'm the exact same way. I bought the 2 TV system for HD and my parents' TV and my monitor at my house. If they didn't allow this, I'd cancel Netflix immediately.
Amazon TV I'd keep because Prime is its own reward.
I use nothing else. I enjoy Netflix Originals way way more than anything on TV and almost everything at theaters.
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue they gain money (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. It's not zero, nor is it 12.5 billion. It's somewhere in between.
I would argue it's a negative loss (i.e. profit).
People who are using shared passwords cannot afford to pay themselves.
It's annoying sharing a password, so as soon as they can pay, they do get their own account.
In the meantime they help spread the word about good things to watch on that service to friends, who are more inclined to save up...
Every viewer is marketing potential. There is no way the services lose any money on password sharing, the only real question is how much they gain, and how much they would lose by cracking down on password sharing.
Re:I would argue they gain money (Score:5, Insightful)
People who are using shared passwords cannot afford to pay themselves.
No. A few people who are using shared passwords cannot afford to pay themselves. Many just choose not to pay, and justify not paying with some bullshit rationalization. What they should choose is to not abuse the system.
Re:I would argue they gain money (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who are using these streaming services and not paying are (largely) relatives or close friends of people who are paying for the service.
Sure, you could crack down on password sharing and some small percentage of people would buy their own subscription, and then your streaming counts would go down, but the net gain, in terms of subscriber payments is going to be pretty close to nil
And, now, with the balkanization of digital content streaming over multiple services so that rightsholding conglomerates can try to more directly siphon money from people that want to watch shows online, the costs to people go up, and sharing becomes more likely to happen in order to offset that incremental cost.
This is stupid, pointless, and counterproductive, if the focus is on getting as many people as possible to see the value in paying for a streaming service. Either one service with almost everything on it (as Netflix had almost been) for a certain price, or a fraction of that price split up amongst different services makes sense as something lots of people would pay for. The same amount multiplied across multiple streaming services will just get you people sharing access to get a cost they can deal with.
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Re:I would argue they gain money (Score:5, Insightful)
No. A few people who are using shared passwords cannot afford to pay themselves. Many just choose not to pay, and justify not paying with some bullshit rationalization. What they should choose is to not abuse the system.
They are not abusing anything. They are using a feature provided by the service provider exactly as the service provider intended. Since the service provider has the technical ability to cause the password sharing feature to behave differently than it does, but choose not to, the feature is being used as intended, not abused.
And because that technical ability exists and is not being used, none of them are "losing" any money at all. Choosing to possibly leave money on the table is not lost money. It's consciously avoided money. (If in fact there would be a net gain if they changed the behavior of password sharing, a scenario that's not at all certain.)
People like you using words like "abuse" and "bullshit rationalization" are utterly irrational on the subject of copyrighted material. Especially in the case of streaming providers. All of the content creators got paid to create the material. Every last one of them. They have unions that see to it, from the Screen Actors Guild to the Teamsters and everyone in between. Whether or not the megacorporation they signed their rights over to gets paid is an entirely different question, and attempting to frame it as if someone using the password sharing feature of streaming services is somehow stealing a bite of bread out of the mouth of an actor's child is much more than disingenuous: it's intentional, malicious distortion for the purposes of manipulation purely for profit. We know what you're doing, and we're tired of your lies.
Re:I would argue they gain money (Score:5, Insightful)
Literally everything this^ guy says, but double.
Below a certain demographic age line, nobody is willing to pay for content at all. Any content you could pay to stream can also be found online for free, in a format that allows you to own it forever. These companies are lucky as fuck that people deign to do the slightly-easier thing and pay for the convenience of streaming. That convenience margin narrows every quarter, and gets worse with each new streamer added to the market. Frankly, with literally everything available free with almost zero effort, it astounds me these "businesses" can make money selling temporary streams at all.
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Literally everything this^ guy says, but double.
Below a certain demographic age line, nobody is willing to pay for content at all. Any content you could pay to stream can also be found online for free, in a format that allows you to own it forever. These companies are lucky as fuck that people deign to do the slightly-easier thing and pay for the convenience of streaming. That convenience margin narrows every quarter, and gets worse with each new streamer added to the market. Frankly, with literally everything available free with almost zero effort, it astounds me these "businesses" can make money selling temporary streams at all.
People who pay for steaming aren't doing the "slightly-easier" thing; they're doing the right thing. Most people that want to read, view or listen to other peoples' creative works are fine with paying for the privilege. Not everyone is a sociopath.
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Should public libraries have a cover charge?
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Should public libraries have a cover charge?
They do. It's paid by the taxpayers.
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Should public libraries have a cover charge?
They do. It's paid by the taxpayers.
I pay >$5000/year in property taxes. Our town has a new library with many resources. It is open almost every day and many nights. I grew up in a town in which a similar house would pay about $700/year. The last time I visited my old hometown, my kids tried to go to the local library. It was closed. It is now only open on Saturday mornings and Tuesday afternoons. I explained to the kids how you get what you pay for.
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They are not abusing anything. They are using a feature provided by the service provider exactly as the service provider intended. Since the service provider has the technical ability to cause the password sharing feature to behave differently than it does, but choose not to, the feature is being used as intended, not abused.
What a disingenuous load of crap. If you leave your car unlocked with the key in the ignition, that doesn't that if a car thief takes it it isn't auto theft, even though you had the ability to keep that from happening. No. No matter how much lipstick you apply, it's still a pig.
4.2. The Netflix service and any content viewed through our service are for your personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household. (Netflix Terms of Service). Yeah, that sounds like p
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How do they know that it's not a dad at work watching while his wife is at home watching while his children are also watching? That's 3 streams right there under one household.
Plus roommates are a thing.
What is a "household" becomes even murkier when a kid goes off to college. Most parents consider that to still be one household.
The truth is that line was put in by lawyers so that Netflix can turn around to content producers and say that it's in the terms of service.
It's very bootlicker of you to jump in he
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Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually it is quite the opposite. Charter MADE MORE PROFIT because of password-sharing. Were the password not shared with a Charter customer, that customer would have no need of such an expensive Internet access plan would they?
CNN alone lost 500 billion dollars in revenue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well this is how the estimated that 12.5 billion lost revenue due to password sharing.
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Re:Bogus (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit. It's not zero, nor is it 12.5 billion. It's somewhere in between. They definitely lose money but nowhere near what they claim.
I think it's complicated.
There are people who don't subscribe but would if they couldn't share. That's revenue lost.
There are people who don't subscribe and still wouldn't. That's revenue neutral.
There are people who do subscribe and would not if they couldn't share. That's revenue gained.
The last group is perhaps less obvious, but the ability to share your subscription creates actual value for the person who shares it. Maybe it's goodwill, maybe the recipient kicks in some cash to help pay for it. If you take away the ability to share, you reduce the value of the subscription to these people, and some of them would then decide that it's not worth the cost.
Note that all of the above is about revenue. They also need to consider cost, because those extra streams consume bandwidth and server cycles. Determining what policy would maximize profit is even more complicated that deciding how to maximize revenue.
Exactly. I watched numbers plummet in adult (Score:5, Informative)
You're exactly right. Of those who currently illicitly get it for free, some would subscribe and some wouldn't, if they didn't get it illicitly.
For several years, a company I founded was the leading company dealing with password sharing and password theft on web sites. Most of the sites dealing with password sharing were porn sites. Over several years, tracking data on sites like GirlsGoneWild.com and a hundred thousand orders, I learned a few things.
First, we could confirm what is often true - a small number of accounts caused a significant portion of costs, bandwidth etc. Because one guy would share with 59 of his closest friends. Some would SELL access to their account at a price a bit lower than a legit account; most didn't collect money from others. After logging the activity for a while, turning on enforcement of even generous limits to the number of devices decreased costs by a noticeable amount.
There were four generations of password-sharing security solutions. As each was implemented, companies using the better systems saw a bump in revenue and a drop in bandwidth. Speciality sites saw larger increases in subscriptions - people wanted to get this content, even if they had to pay for it. By analogy, it's common sense that many Game of Thrones fans would get their own account if needed, users of pop music streaming services would just go elsewhere. Providers who provide unique content that people really want will get more subscribers by blocking out cheaters. Providers of commodity content will just cause the cheaters to go elsewhere, lowering the provider's costs.
Then the tube sites happened. Pornhub especially. The cheaters didn't just share passwords, they downloaded all of the content and posted on pornhub and elsewhere. That put a LOT of porn people out of business. It really damaged the industry, leaving most of it now controlled by a few large companies. Previously it was mostly people working from home or small companies.
Re:Bogus (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Funny)
Under American Capitalism, sharing with anyone who isn't of your bloodline is seen as weird, suspect, gay and probably communist.
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What's the difference between a family of five with Netflix and one guy sharing a password with four people?
Literally nothing.
Actually there's a huge difference. Hardware provisioning and fee schedules are set up with an expected usage range in mind. When that usage range is exceeded, then bad things happen, like bad network performance or service delivery for under-provisioned hardware or negative or underwhelming profits. While we might reflexively scoff at corporations that miss profit targets, we would vigorously defend our own personals rights to achieve our personal salary goals, even if they were way out of line with med
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I'm pretty sure that Netlix does not consider people who live in the same household and are all using one account to be a violation of their TOS.
Actually, it would be pretty damn annoying to have to always reset a family TV with a buiilt-in Netflix app every time someone different wanted to watch. It is more straightforward to just have login profiles for each person who lives there.
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Seriously this. If they didn't ok sharing why would they have the "Who's watching" feature?
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They *do* okay sharing... within a single household.
That's not the kind of sharing that Netflix is objecting to anyways.
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Seriously this. If they didn't ok sharing why would they have the "Who's watching" feature?
So, you're unfamiliar with the Netflix TOS. Accounts are explictly "per household".
The "Who's Watching" feature is there so different members of the household can have different queues (you know, the "Your List" thing).
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I'd argue that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only real divergence is in the participants' own definition of "household". For example:
* Kids using parents' account, even though they live a thousand miles away.
* Adult children who log into their parents' media devices while home at Christmas, and leave it logged in after going home. If their parents are anything like mine, the likelihood of those parents even bothering to watch anything between Christmas and Easter using that account probably app
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I'd argue that in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only real divergence is in the participants' own definition of "household".
There may indeed be diverse opinions on the meaning of the term; fortunately, however, there is a legal definition [thefreedictionary.com] of "household" that takes precedence: Individuals who comprise a family unit and who live together under the same roof; individuals who dwell in the same place and comprise a family, sometimes encompassing domestic help; all those who are under the control of one domestic head.
The point being, it's exceptionally rare for people to share credentials with people they literally have no relationship at all with, whether it be family or friendship
That "exceptionally rare" sounds more like opinion than fact, so I'll counter with another opinion: it's not exception
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Who cares what the legal definition of "household" is. The Terms of Service does not define "household" so it means whatever you decide it means.
Pay Per View(er). (Score:2)
Actually, it would be pretty damn annoying to have to always reset a family TV with a buiilt-in Netflix app every time someone different wanted to watch. It is more straightforward to just have login profiles for each person who lives there.
That's what smart TVs and facial recognition is for, isn't it?
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What's the difference between a family of five with Netflix and one guy sharing a password with four people? Literally nothing.
Wrong. The first is compliant with Netflix TOS; the second is not.
Not "Thieves" and not free: they paid for it! (Score:2)
That's assuming the "thieves" would actually pay for the service if they didn't get it for "free".
They are not thieves and it is not free: they are merely using the streams that they paid for. How is this any sort of problem? If the only person who is supposed to watch the service is the one paying for it then why are they providing a service with more than one stream, let alone five. Do they really think people watch 2.5 streams per eyeball or do a surprisingly large number of spiders have Netflix subscriptions?
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Actually, that's not true.
Before I got my own Netflix account, two of my adult children that do not live with us had volunteered to share their password with me. I declined because I did not want them doing something that would be in violation of Netflix TOS. I now pay for my own account, which is only utilized by the people in my own household.
But I take your point.... I have absolutely no doubt I'm the exception and quite far from the rule. The number of other people who would do what I did is a
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Funny)
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However, if you buy 4 tickets and give three of them to 3 other people, that is not "stealing", and is a far more accurate analogy. If NetFlix et al were to cut their prices to "single stream" prices, then the problem would stop. That means my 4 stream NetFlix subscription would cost $4/month rather than $16/month.
If NetFlix did this they would clearly and without a doubt have less revenue, not more.
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Exactly - that is what politicians are paid to do, and we would not want their revenue stream to decrease, would we?
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
The online (streaming) video services are not making this claim. Third-party busy-bodies and Cable Companies are making the claim. The online (streaming) services know on which side their bread is buttered, and do not want to cut their revenue based on the sewage spewed by those not in the business.
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Calm down, friend. The $9 billion wasn't Netflix revenue. From TFS: In 2019, companies lost about $9.1 billion to password piracy and sharing. The person saying that was the CEO of Charter, and he appears to be postulating that the streaming services aren't the only companies losing money because of password sharing. As usual, the ISPs are taking the position that any time anyone receives a bit they're not authorized to receive, it costs the ISPs big time.
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
If they really thought password sharing was a problem they'd do something about it.
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The summary says they'll do something about it as soon as the initial growth phase of the niche ends.
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Charter cares, they've had a project for tracking this since August 2018 (STVA/STB group). Want blows my mind is Charter cares more about lost streaming revenue than underground groups dealing in cloned modems.
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So said the people who shared music on Napster in the 1990's. Then came the FBI backed subpoenas & search warrants, jon-doe pay up orders, and single-moms getting threatened with jail time if they didn't pay thousands of dollars in extortion money because their 12 year old listened to some MP3.
Don't be so ignorant of history next time you make some off handed comment.
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$5 per device fee will fix it. and each device ma (Score:2)
$5 per device fee will fix it. and each device max 1 live feed
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You sound like someone who never travels. Dumb solution, customers won't accept it. I need my streams when I'm on vacation.
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device id is checked on login.
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Netflix is web based so I could be on multiple computers. Home, work, laptop, work laptop, media center, tablet, phone, gf's phone, gf's tablet, gf's laptop. It adds up quick. I'm not paying $5 per device.
I get a notification via email whenever my Netflix (Score:5, Informative)
gets registered on a new device.
I have 2 laptops, 3 tablets, a phone, and a couple google tv devices in my home that I am the only user of.
I don't usually watch more than one of them at a time.
I wonder if they consider this "password sharing"?
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No, of course not. Each service comes with a certain number of simultaneous streams allowed, for this very purpose.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for these companies? (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean.... should I really feel bad that CBS and Disney+ aren't making as big of a profit margin as they "should" be because of password sharing?
Maybe they shouldn't put their best shows behind a paywall, and perhaps the need to steal them will go away.
Re:Am I supposed to feel sorry for these companies (Score:4, Interesting)
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The ghost of Jack Valenti says:
"I say to you that password sharing is to the American 'content provider' and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
Matter of Opinion (Score:3)
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It is a matter of opinion that they are losing money. If I want to share my password on my account, I should be able to do that. The streaming services can limit my number of streams if they want.
They do. Of the services I subscribe to, and share my password with my family, Netflix allows five, Hulu allows four, AT&TTVNow allows two. Not sure about Amazon Prime, but they haven't told me I'm using too many.
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Half you say?! (Score:5, Insightful)
The other half live in houses with three or more people in them, and Mom and Dad do not want to watch the same thing as Grandma, or Johnny, or Jill.
Funny how cable went from providing a signal to every TV in the house (analog) to only TVs provided with rental equipment (digital), to wanting only, what, 2 streams per house? Gotta capture that consumer surplus any way that you can.
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I remember when cable internet was covered by the same TOS as cable TV, namely that you could only have one computer connected to your internet connection at a time. I made good money setting up Windows 3.11 home networks for families who wanted to use the internet on more than one device at the same time.
This is not piracy. It's a loss leader. (Score:5, Interesting)
So the question becomes this: When does someone cease to be part of a household? If someone is on vacation for a week? A month? What about students living in a dorm? Legally, they're part of their household (for voting purposes, etc.) until they graduate, which means they could be potentially using a stream from another location for 4+ years. I suspect that if you take out the use by college students, the supposed "losses" likely disappear, or very nearly so.
If you want to crack down on that behavior and try to kick college students off for being physically away from home for too long, the best-case scenario is that one person buys service for an entire dorm, and you still don't really recover a meaningful percentage of the hypothetical "loss". The worst-case scenario is that they don't buy service at all, and you lose critical viewership among college students who, although underfunded in the short term, are likely to turn into real customers after graduation.
That, right there, is why they don't go after this "piracy". They know that it is better for their long-term business to ignore it. They would have to be complete idiots to crack down on this.
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And don't forget people like truck drivers who travel for a living; using the wifi at a different truck stop each night across the country.
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Or you discourage it. Enforce the stream limits in a different way that makes it inconvenient to share with mo9re than a few people.
Like you pay for 4 streams. Instead of denying the 5th stream, let it through. To get it back down to 4 streams, you log out the person watching the longest in the account. Be mean, and lo
What about lost revene from people leaving? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did this study also consider how many subscribers they'd lose if they banned password sharing? I'd imagine a portion of the password sharers are also lowing their cost by sharing the cost of subscriptions. (I know people that do this, I don't subscribe to anything because it's a waste of time and money). Anyway, you cut out the sharing and you'll also lose subscribers and revenue. The most ridiculous thing for content subscriptions is it is a fixed cost, the market/demand for people that might be interested in viewing content has varying price points. I think the content subscribers know this, and don't want to lose revenue.
they were losing more than $70M/yr from sharing (Score:3)
Afterwards, Walt was puzzled. "But how am I going to charge per seat? This thing lets everyone in the room see it." They did not get a contract.
Sounds like the same thing, they're "losing $70Mil/yr" since they're providing a service and people aren't paying for it. Somehow I suspect that they won't magically be getting that full extra 70 Mil no matter WHAT they do. Conversely, I subscribe to an anime streaming site. They provide only A SINGLE device stream. A different one provides 5 streams. I don't know their "shared password" rate, but I'd bet the first one is a LOT lower.
If they actually want their duly owed 70 Mil they're going to have to work for it - for instance, only allow streams going to the same class-C address at a time. That'll still allow for multiple home viewing sessions yet at the same time block "extra" sessions. This way won't completely BLOCK those other sessions but there's a chance you'll be inconvenienced and solve the problem yourself. Or only view X number of shows a month and do a lock-out until you pay more.
It's technically solvable, they just don't want to spend any money while increasing their profit. Morally? I think that ship sank long ago. It's one thing if it's physical ("You wouldn't steal a car"), another if it's logical ("You wouldn't steal a COPY of a car." "Not if it's a Pinto or Yugo.")
Use REAL data (Score:3)
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Bogus story based on suspect original estimate (Score:2)
Do not sell packages (Score:2)
Half the people in the country live in houses with two or less people in them, and yet these services have five streams
Simple, stop selling packages with multiple accounts. If you want two streams, you pay for two streams. Nobody would share an account with friends if they cannot use it simultaneously.
But if your policy says "if you want 4k, you need our top subscription which gives you four streams", then do not blame me for sharing the account with my friends.
Just allow one then (Score:2)
People won't buy that? Will then I guess sometimes you can't have your cake and eat it too.
Crappy view of things (Score:5, Insightful)
I see at least 2 problems here.
1st: I imagine that most users see a little password sharing as a feature, not an exploited bug. It's what creates the value for spending the 60-100 a month to get all the content we want. Cable didn't want to sell us al a carte channels, so we got it elsewhere, and now our friends can watch the same stuff as us!
2nd: The rabid capitalism of seeing anything other that exponential growth as an existential risk. Why don't toilet manufactures freak out about moderate growth? Because they haven't see exponential growth since the early 20th century. They know other than new construction and the infrequent replacement that the market is saturated. Same for kitchen faucets or microwave ovens. Without some big technological shift some things just don't have much growth anymore, and this should be planned into the business model.
Or they can start gouging their customers, monetizing privacy, and selling their souls for pennies. Worked for Facebook.
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God damn! Now you've gone and done it. Next thing you know toilet manufacturers will be charging for "sharing" the toilet and you will have to buy a "toilet subscription" for each person that uses the toilet.
We stopped sharing our passwords... (Score:2)
We got to the point where we were tired of all the various family members leeching off of us. Most of them haven't bought netflix or hulu access but then they are also not using the stream anymore. Out of the 3 households that were using it, I think one might of picked up their own netflix.
Seems it was a net gain for Hulu and netflix. They are not wasting the resources sending streams to people not sending them money.
P.S. Netflix lost a little because I only pay for a single stream and no HD where as before
Sharing is a feature (Score:2)
Password sharing is a billable feature. I Pay extra for 5 screens. If the service does not want me to "authorize" 5 screens at once, then they should probly not sell me the rights to authorize them.
Cable found a way to charge you for each TV in your house when they moved to big stupid cable boxes. Now they want to do the same thing again with streaming.
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Who gives a flying fuck what the Cable Companies want. They are merely bystanders.
This has already been solved (Score:2)
If you're selling the service with 5 simultaneous streams, then it's none of your business whom I share the streams with. You contracted to give me 5 streams, you better be prepared to give me 5 streams. Doesn't matter if the other 4 are being used
Not all of them (Score:2)
Amazon doesn't have the problem, because if you share that, aunty will order booze and stuff on your dime.
It's bogus anyway, they would also love to cash on your non-related friends watching movies on your own fucking couch, like the video guys tried it with oil rigs and retirement homes and kids birthdays watching The Lion King together.
They are just leeches.
Why does he care? And why do I care that he cares? (Score:2)
Charter Communications is an ISP. They don't produce or own content. Why in the world should the CEO of Charter care whether Netflix lets people share passwords or not? More to the point, why should I care about his opinion of this? (Short answer: "I don't because I get service from AT&T, not Charter".)
He should stick to his business, getting bits from point A to point B at high rates with low loss and jitter. That's all we're paying him to do.
Now, I know why he's upset: he's probably got a financial
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Charter Communications is lying. They are failing to disclose how much money they are making BECAUSE people share passwords with people who use Charter Communications as an ISP. If there was no password sharing, then those people would not need to spend $100 on a 4 mbit Internet access plan and would instead only buy the $25 1 mbit Internet Access plan. Therefore Charter Communications is MAKING and additional $75/month for each password that is shared to a Charter Communications customer.
This means, of
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If there was no password sharing, then those people would not need to spend $100 on a 4 mbit Internet access plan and would instead only buy the $25 1 mbit Internet Access plan. Therefore Charter Communications is MAKING and additional $75/month for each password that is shared to a Charter Communications customer.
This means, of course, that if password sharing (ie, simultaneous streams) was eliminated, Charter Communications would make LESS revenue, not MORE.
Well, that was my initial reaction too: as an ISP, I want to encourage people to use my service and sharing passwords is a great way to do that. Except that what I think Charter actually wants to do is convince people to buy the 100 Mbps service but only use 10 Mbps. Thing is, I don't think cheating your customers is a sustainable business model. If you do that, you piss them off and they jump ship as soon as a viable competitor arises (and one will, sooner or later). If that's what Charter is doing, I'm no
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Just fyi, Charter did get into the production business this time last year and they own a few channels of their own under the spectrum brand.
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Cool. What is their streaming service URL?
Seen it already (Score:2)
Uh, what? (Score:2)
The actual streaming companies are fine with the way things are working, but a *cable company* is complaining?
Not 'costing' them anything. (Score:2)
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No, the CABLE COMPANY is complaining because they are not able to sell their $200/month Cable TV service to people who are the "recipients" of password-sharing. Their theory is that if passwords were not shared that would cause people to subscribe to Cable TV for $200/month in preference to getting their own $4/month single stream UHD subscription from NetFlix.
The streaming company's are not lamenting anything. The Cable Companies (Charter specifically) is lamenting that some people are apparently dumping
streams (Score:2)
Excuses excuses (Score:2)
I love how people say they can't afford their own subscription to streaming services as they stop on their way home to pick up two $12 coffees and two $8 pre-made green salads and then go home and watch somebody else's Netflix account.
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I will be happy to not share my NetFlix UHD top-of-the-line account that costs $16 per month (with 4 simultaneous streams) and pay $4/month for a single-stream account that has the same capabilities. But, if NetFlix insists that to get what I want (UHD) then I have to be watching 4 simultaneous streams, then they should expect that I will be using 4 simultaneous streams -- and whether they like it or not is immaterial. They can sue me. Or fuck off. I don't really care either way. But I will *NOT* pay $1
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Correction. If they offered a $16/month package that had UHD (1080p and 2160p HDR) and changed the base audio to either Dolby TrueHD (with or without ATMOS metadata but *must* be over a lossless TrueHD base) or perferentially DTS-HD Master Audio (with or without DTS:X metadata) for a single concurrent stream, that would be worth it.
But for Dolby Digital lossy lowres audio base (whether with or without ATMOS metadata) at UHD (1080p or 2160p HDR), $4 per concurrent stream is about what it is worth.
This all depends on whose ox is being gored (Score:2)
Back about a decade ago I was attending a major network operator conference where a Sprint VP made a presentation asking for ISP assistance is restricting "abusive bandwidth consumption" by customers were using Sprint LTE for primary network connections.
At the same time, Sprint was running a national ad campaign with their president repeatedly declaring that , "at Sprint, unlimited means unlimited" and explaining how they never restricted bandwidth for unlimited customers.
The VP said that it was clear that
Bullshit (Score:2)
They are still lying through their teeth when claiming these "loss" numbers. These numbers are generated by assuming everybody that accessed their content without paying would still have accessed it in the same way if they had to pay. That is obviously wrong and many, many studies show that losses due to "piracy" are massively smaller than these people like to claim.
The whole claim is nothing but a big, fat lie.
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Actually the quality is better when one acquires the content through "other means". The video itself is trivial in size, but you can get MUCH better audio from other sources.
Now, if NetFlix streamed in DTS HD Master Audio to go with their 1080p video, that would rock and MIGHT just be worth $16/month for a single concurrent stream. However, $4/month per stream for UHD with DD+ as they currently offer (but insist I buy and use 4 concurrent streams) then that is about exactly what it is worth and I shall us