Every now and then, we’ll hear about someone who pulls clever stunts to use streaming services for free like watching Netflix under their ex’s account by naming themselves “add profile.”
If and when the account holders find out who’s racking up streams on their dime, they might be inclined to change their password to get them off. After all, they’re paying their own monthly fee, not everybody else’s, right?
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However, even those who are cool with other people using their accounts may soon find out just how not cool with it the company itself is.
Once upon a time, it wasn’t that hard for TV providers to keep non-paying users off their services.
By using secure boxes and encrypted signals, they could ensure that most people who peeked in on their channels without paying for them only saw scrambled messes like this.
However, one of the reasons that streaming platforms left old school TV providers in the dust was that they made content simpler and more convenient to access.
Instead of requiring a specific device on your TV, all you need now is a password to access your account from whatever device you want.
Until now, anybody who wanted to share their passwords could do it easily and to their heart’s content.
As Variety reported , not only did providers like Netflix and HBO not have much power to stop this sharing, but many of them didn’t seem to want to.
In those early days, password sharing was almost treated like promotion for the service.
However, any password sharers reading this will be disappointed to learn that those days could be coming to an end.
Many of these formerly blasé companies found a reason to change their tune when market research company Parks Associates found that password sharing could cost the streaming industry up to $9.9 billion in lost revenue by 2021.
Moreover, a British firm named Synamedia recently unveiled a way to fight this practice at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
What Synamedia intends to do is to use bots to comb through data on users’ streaming behaviors to find out who’s most likely to be password sharing.
For instance, if a user’s account is being used on opposite coasts of the United States, that’s a pretty clear sign. Obviously, they can’t be in two places at once.
Yet, Synamedia’s A.I.s can also pick up on subtler patterns to tell when account sharing is going on.
This could range from noticing that a user is literally streaming 24/7 to establishing patterns based on the content that user is watching.
Once it has enough clues, the bot grades the likelihood that somebody is password sharing on a scale of one to 10.
One thing that Synamedia isn’t targeting, however, is use of the same account within the same immediate family.
As Synamedia chief product officer Jean-Marc Racine told Variety , the industry considers this acceptable, so the company’s A.I.’s are supposed to dig deep enough into user data to filter this out.
But of course, the big question remains: What happens to users who get caught account-sharing?
Racine said that’s up to the company once Synamedia hands over their findings, but recommended against punishing users who do it in all cases. One option he suggested was for companies to target these users with up-sells for premium packages with more simultaneous streams available.
Other options that were less likely to be ignored were specific messages identifying the user as an account-sharer and asking them to pay up or restricting their access to the service’s most popular content.
But of course, since it’s up to the streaming services, there’s no guarantee that they won’t just close a user’s account.
Since Synamedia is also trying to smoke out any criminal enterprises selling TV login information online, it seems likely that the more people a user shares their password with, the more severe a punishment they could potentially get.
h/t: Variety
