TV Has A Billion Dollar Password-Sharing Problem And Cable Wants To Crack Down

If your access to entertainment depends on passwords from your parents, college buds, or your college bud’s parents, then the way you stream may soon get a lot harder.

Bloomberg has a new report about calls for an industrywide crackdown on password sharing. The charge is being led by cable and satellite providers. It’s reported that those providers lost an estimated 3 million customers in 2017, which comes out to them losing around $3.5 billion this year alone. The execs in charge reckon the prevalence of password sharing–seriously, people just go on Twitter and ask literally anyone for a login!–is why numbers are way down.

To examine the prevalence of password sharing, researchers at ESPN asked 50 millennial sports fans if they shared passwords. Every single one of them raised their hand. It’s estimated that one-third of internet users use someone else’s credentials to gain access to cable TV.

Justin Connolly, executive vice president for affiliate sales and marketing at ESPN, called this “piracy. It’s people consuming something they haven’t paid for. The more the practice is viewed with a shrug, the more it creates a dynamic where people believe it’s acceptable. And it’s not.”

That sentiment is shared by Charter Communications Inc. (known as Spectrum to those with cable) CEO Tom Rutledge. “There’s lots of extra streams, there’s lots of extra passwords, there’s lots of people who could get free service,” said Rutledge.

To address this issue, Charter has started pressuring programmers to limit the number of simultaneous streams on an account. That’s a necessary move, as they claim that they saw an instance of one account with 30,000 simultaneous streams. ESPN has already taken a step towards limiting concurrent streams, dropping the number to five from the previous 10 simultaneous streams that were allowed.

Providers also want log-in prompts to pop up more than just once a year, making users re-enter passwords to gain access. The fear amongst providers, though, is that the more difficult they make logging in, the more likely viewers will cancel their services altogether.

Not every network sees this as a big problem, however. Jeff Cusson, a spokesman for HBO, said that password sharing “is still relatively small and we are seeing no economic impact on our business.”

What does this mean moving forward? It’s too early to tell, as providers and programmers and networks all have to get on the same page regarding how many simultaneous streams to allow. They’ve identified the problem, but the solution isn’t as easy to pinpoint. Just don’t be surprised if that cable login you’ve been using for the last year stops working at some point in the future.