Cable TV's Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming (bloomberg.com)

Charter Communications' CEO, Tom Rutledge, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing. It's a growing problem that could cost pay-TV companies millions of subscribers -- and billions of dollars in revenue -- when they can least afford it. Bloomberg reports: Cable and satellite carriers in North America have lost 3 million customers this year alone. But the prevalence of password sharing suggests many of those customers, and possibly many more, are watching popular shows like "The Walking Dead" for free, robbing pay-TV providers and programmers of paying subscribers and advertising dollars. Most pay-TV companies only require users to re-enter their passwords for each device once a year. During contract negotiations this fall, Charter urged Viacom Inc., home of Comedy Central and MTV, to help limit illicit password swapping. The cable company wants programmers 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. ESPN, meanwhile, has reduced the number of simultaneous streams that it allows on its app to five from 10 and is considering cutting that to three, Connolly said. ESPN wants to work more closely with distributors to validate subscribers when there are high volumes of streaming on its app outside the cable company's territory.

Comments

Brilliant strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure all of those millennials sharing their parents' passwords will immediately sign up for cable as soon as the restrictions take effect.

Didn't Netflix solve this?

[networkBoy]

$n.nn for two screens $n.nn + $5 or so for 4 screens.
Seems pretty dang simple to me.
Rather than trying to police the mess that is "is this a shared PWD or is this a mobile user or is this a legit user that moved their cable box for the night?" they just limit concurrent streams to whatever you've paid for.

Re:Didn't Netflix solve this?

[Anubis IV]

Netflix has been pretty awesome about this stuff for years, in fact. Prior to the current plans (i.e. back when they didn’t have profiles and only offered two screens), Netflix used to state in their terms that each account was “per household”, and then they had a generous definition for “household” that made it applicable to everyone from unrelated roommates living together to college students away at school. And they were really smart when they added multiple profiles per account, since they all share a single login, including access to billing details, which acts as a natural disincentive against sharing your account too far and wide.

To paraphrase Princess Leia

[Yaztromo]

The more you tighten your grip cable companies, the more customers will slip through your fingers.

Yaz

Take a cue from Apple / Adobe

[SoulMaster]

Just limit it by MAC to a certain # of devices, and let the user delete devices from time to time. Apple does this already, so does Adobe CC, and Google Music. It's not that hard.

The whining is coming not from the content providers, but from the cable companies, because they're the obsolete ones getting screwed. Viacom doesn't care because the more streams there are (regardless of shared login) the more $ they get to charge advertisers on OTT.

It's simple math: a+b = cable companies just need to die already.

-SM

Cable TV's attempt to boost Netflix subs is coming

[nctritech]

"Cable TV's attempt to boost Netflix subs is coming" - corrected headline