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Video Services May Use AI To Crack Down on Password Sharing (variety.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch "Game of Thrones?" That may soon be getting a lot harder, thanks to new efforts to crack down on password sharing for pay TV and online video services. One of these efforts, launched by London-based Synamedia ahead of next week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), even uses artificial intelligence to uncover notorious password sharers. Credentials Sharing Insight, as the new service is being called, targets both casual password sharing as well as criminal enterprises looking to resell pay TV login information. However, the focus clearly is on friends and family taking their generosity a bit too far, explained Symanedia chief product officer Jean-Marc Racine in an interview with Variety this week.
[...] Most services have tried to curtail password sharing by limiting the number of simultaneous streams, with little else to go by to identify abuse. "Today, you are in the dark," he said. Synamedia's solution on the other hand digs through lots of data to cluster users based on their streaming behavior. This can include user's physical location (someone streaming from both coasts at the same time) as well as general usage patterns (someone streaming 24/7). The company can even take a look at the specific content streamed by a user to identify unusual patterns. Based on these clues, Synamedia trains models to score users on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating whether they are likely sharing their passwords or not.
[...] Most services have tried to curtail password sharing by limiting the number of simultaneous streams, with little else to go by to identify abuse. "Today, you are in the dark," he said. Synamedia's solution on the other hand digs through lots of data to cluster users based on their streaming behavior. This can include user's physical location (someone streaming from both coasts at the same time) as well as general usage patterns (someone streaming 24/7). The company can even take a look at the specific content streamed by a user to identify unusual patterns. Based on these clues, Synamedia trains models to score users on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating whether they are likely sharing their passwords or not.
WTF DO YOU NEED AI FOR THIS?!
Geez - just cap the number of simultaneous logins to whatever your business is comfortable with (usually 2 or 3) and/or record the device IDs.
It's not rocket science people. But then AI is the new electrolytes... it's got wut plants crave!
>> Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch "Game of Thrones?"
No, this is SlashDot. We pretty much just pirate GoT; using other people's credentials is way too much of a hassle.
This is about as much an application of A.I. as FizzBuzz.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
And here i was thinkng an ISPs core buisness was selling access and badwith not counting the number of connected devices, why shuld they care if a given load from ther costumers comes from 1 ot 10 devices the net result on their nerwork is abbout the same, what am I missing here?
I'm pretty sure when you signed up for these services that somewhere in the agreement they say you are not allowed to give your information to one million of your closest friends, or use the service in any other than for your personal enjoyment (i.e. no streaming it to the world).
If your next statement is along the lines, "I don't care what the agreement says", then you're the reason these companies are taking these steps.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
There's a good way, and a bad way to deal with this.
The media industry is one of the few industries who treat their customers like absolute villians, and people don't seem to mind. Most of what's available on TV/Movies/Music is the equivalent of a 'mom blog list article on why dogs ARE children'. It's garbage. Just say no, and free yourself from the chains of abuse.
Read a book, surf the web for content YOU choose, visit friends, etc.
Not that hard.
This is effectively DRM and will lead to an increase in piracy. These dumbasses never learn.
Founder, Americans Allied Against Alliteration
hmmm...
If you can't set your usage policy straight, you're just asking to piss off your paying customers, and asking for competition - if you have any - to disrupt you. Corporate stupidity knows no end.
Why can't companies just do one stream at a time per login? Am I missing something really obvious?
I don't respond to AC's.
If you give the account info to a bunch of unknown individuals one of them is going to change the password and lock everyone else out.
Then you lose all your viewing history and favorite lists and they jack your plan up to the ultra premium 50 user 8K video plan until you can get the card canceled or regain access to the account.
So really you don't want to share your account with individuals you don't trust.
Pretty much best case scenario for sharing with a large number of people is they all turn out to be trustworthy and then you never get the chance to use your own account because the max concurrent number of streams are always in use.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I mean, giving your neighbor your newspaper after you read it is a criminal offense that should get you imprisoned for life, right?
Also, none of those metrics are failsafe. Some legitimate customers will travel a lot (varying location), work alternating day and night shifts (stream at seemingly random hours), and/or have irregular sleep cycles or suffer from insomnia (sometimes spending all day and night watching Netflix). Judging peoples taste in series to judge whether they are one or multiple people also sounds like something that can backfire for people that legitimately have unusual tastes, or people that often have friends visiting with different tastes. I hope their solution is to at least ask the customer for an explanation, instead of an "AI" simply autobanning all "weird" customers.
I still share my Netflix with my ex. She's willing to pay for Netflix herself, but there is a problem. She can't take her watching history, ratings, and her list of bookmarked titles to her new account. When asked, Netflix say "meh, just start over".
Come on dudes, your devs could easily add account merges and splits (and while at it, give me an option to let me watch the end credits in full screen in peace). I'm not motivated enough to write a scraper/saver to copy her profile from my account to hers using Greasemonkey (the watch list is probably easy to get, but the entirely to watch progress and the simulation needed to bring every timestamp over might be harder on my end), and you guys don't seem either.
But hey, AI is cool. Decent profile handling is so meh. Don't forget the blockchain.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
any fucking script running anywhere is AI.
it's bullshit.
but makes for a lot of AI experts of course.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yup. My first IT job was setting up a home network for a doctor so he could have both his PCs using one Rogers Cable internet modem. They had a rule back then that you had to pay a full monthly subscription fee for each TV accessing the cable TV signal, and each computer accessing the internet.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
The "agreement" foisted on customers is a one-sided leonine contract. It carries no ethical weight whatsoever. Moreover, should an aristocrat choose to contest it, its enforceability in kangaroo court is uncertain. Commoners, of course, have no legal rights in Soviet America.
Taking viewing habits into account sounds pretty stupid. If that's the case it could literally flag your account if a babysitter comes over and watches Netflix while you're out.
I don't think an actual human could look at logs and necessarily determine if there's password sharing going on. An AI would likely be equally unsuccessful.
The current solution is probably the best one: place a reasonable limit on the # of simultaneous streams and call it a day.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain