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Cable TV’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Coming
- Apreche 9y agoPointless. If you crack down on this successfully, people will just find another way. If they don't find another way, they'll move to different content. Too little too late. We're way past game over.
- rco8786 9y agoPassword sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price. They are driving millions of people a year away from their services and the idea that cracking down on password sharing will bring people back to them is quite silly. Speaking anecdotally, I cut the cord years ago and do have some shared password access that I use, but purely "because it's there". I got along fine without it and will continue to do so if this crackdown gets me.
- xadhominemx 9y agoI think you're confused about the role of the cable companies in all this. The cable companies are just the pipe. Cable company margins on video are low. Content providers control the content production and price. Unless you're suggesting the solution to the problem is more vertical integration (a la Comcast NBCUniversal)?
- talmand 9y agoFrom the article: "The chief executive officer of Charter Communications Inc., which sells cable TV under the Spectrum name, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing." Seems to me the cable companies are heavily involved. Which makes sense because they would like to sell the cable TV access just as much as the Internet access. If customers only need streaming and no cable TV then I would imagine they would stand to lose quite a bit of revenue.
- xadhominemx 9y agoI was responding to this bit: >Password sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price Because video is barely profitable and HSD is very profitable, cable companies definitely do not like to sell TV as much as they like to sell HSD. Cord cutting is not as big a deal for the cable companies' profitability as most people think. If anything, the bandwidth required for streaming (now in HD but soon in 4k and then in VR) is so high DSL becomes less viable as a competitor and cable companies can raise prices for HSD even faster.
- rco8786 9y agoby "content" I was mostly referring to how that content is packaged and delivered. Cable customers are paying huge premiums for channels they don't want but have no other choice.
- xadhominemx 9y agoThat is by the design of the content providers
- ankushnarula 9y agoThis is mostly correct. For cable/satellite/OTT, most of the package (Viacom, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, etc) content providers bundle content and get a large lump sum up-front per annum from each distributor. However, premium a la carte content providers (HBO, Showtime, etc) receive a small lump sum plus a a bulk of the per subscription fee. For Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime - content is bundled and paid for up-front per annum on a multi-year contract. For example, Paramount/MGM/Lionsgate/EPIX distributed solely through Netflix thru 2014 and then switched sole distribution to Amazon Prime. Hollywood traditionally likes cash up front because production and marketing costs are "bursty" rather than evenly distributed. And this is because the success to failure rate (risk) of entertainment products is too abysmal to easily obtain reasonable financing rates from lenders or reasonable terms from investors.
- SauciestGNU 9y agoI can only see a crackdown on this as resulting in inconvenience for paying customers. There are so many options for piracy that people will probably find another way to watch streams almost immediately. I suspect that if you invited friends to sit on your couch and watch a broadcast with you, the content companies would claim that as piracy too, since your friends are not necessarily paying subscribers.
- justizin 9y agoRight, in most cases, esp with live sports, these things are already restreamed. In some cases, I have paid for the official streaming service and used the pirated one because it was more performant.
- bryanlarsen 9y agoThis could work, but only if they treat the people affected as customers and potential customers rather than as criminals. - make it easy for the legitimate customers to actually watch their streams. Instead of "too many streams in use", try "click on this link in your email to start watching" - make it easy for free-loaders to watch. Instead of "too many streams", say "click here for an instant 3 month free trial!" Or something like that. You have people who want to watch your stuff. That's a very valuable lead, don't throw it away by offending them.
- talmand 9y ago>> click on this link in your email to start watching How would that work with my Roku?
- amdavidson 9y agouse the smartphone in your pocket to click the link?
- talmand 9y agoSo I now need two devices to watch something on my TV? I would need to wait for said email to show up to click the link? What if my email server is down, no TV? What if I use an email address I share with my friends and family which defeats the purpose?
- phil248 9y agoIf you don't have a readily available email address for things like password resets and two step verification, can you please tell us how you managed to travel back in time to 1998?
- talmand 9y agoI do have such a thing, don't be willfully obtuse. Those that you mention are for things that require security for me and my stuff, not to watch TV.
- stblack 9y agoI watch any live sporting event I fancy, for free. Once you know where to look, the cost is about a minute of your time to pick which particular feed, among many, to watch. Do you want the home-team's broadcaster, the visiting team broadcaster, and do you want that in another language, maybe? It's à-la-carte. A cable company password is never involved. In the future, the old-fashioned companies we know today who don't "get" it will not exist. This Bloomberg article illustrates why, albeit indirectly.
- CPLX 9y agoIf your theory is that in the future people will field expensive teams for sporting events surrounded by high quality cameras and informed commentators who will send out engaging content streams without anyone paying for it you may wish to examine your premise.
- talmand 9y agoIt's funny you say that, I grew up with that very system for decades before streaming became a thing. We had multiple choices of entertainment to watch on TV for completely free. Yes, that's right! Completely free! The only cost was the TV and the time to watch commercials.
- CPLX 9y ago> the time to watch commercials Indeed.
- xxpor 9y agoThe difference was that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, baseball players (for example) made between $5,000 and $100,000 a year. Even with inflation, that's nowhere close to the $500,000 to $30 million they make today.
- QAPereo 9y agoGreat, I’m fine with that. While we’re at it can taxpayers stop paying for stadiums?
- jdblair 9y agoThe Netflix policy here is a good compromise: limit the number of concurrent streams for each account and then turn a blind eye to password sharing. That way sharing passwords is allowed in practice, but also has a clear consequence - you may be blocked from playback if too many of your family members (or friends) are watching simultaneously. Implmenting stream limits is tricky, as there are edge cases that are hard to get right. However, common DRM services like Widevine and Playready have adopted the extensions necessary to implement stream limits, so there are already "of-the-shelf" solutions. In short, this is a non-issue with available technical solutions. Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at Netflix who works on cable set-top boxes.
- majormajor 9y agoI don't think it's that easy technically. The TV everywhere auth + stream limiting seems like a uniquely terrible problem to solve compared to the Netflix version. The HBO 3rd party app streams + the xfinity app streams + the ESPN app streams + the USA Network app streams [ + 30 other channel-specific apps ] all have to report to a single central place for each cable provider, if you're going to do this effectively, right?
- Retric 9y agoIt's just a counter. Also, you can shard based on a hash of the account letting you scale without limit.
- majormajor 9y agoIt's just a counter that has to be implemented properly between dozens of third party partners each with much weaker incentives than you have. It's gonna take a while, especially if you're waiting for things like smart-TV-side apps to get updated. Sorry, you're right, though, I chose the wrong word: it's not a mainly technically challenge e.g. for scaling, it's a process/implementation/people one.
- Retric 9y ago
- samschooler 9y agoOne way to solve this is to look to Spotify. They changed their restriction: only playing music out of one device; into a feature: you can now control your music from any device. In addition to this, they used things like playlists, the discover weekly recommendations and other strategies in order to make it annoying to share an account. WHILE also having the barrier to getting your own account to the point where the annoyances (listening to ads, or paying $7.99 a month) are still better than pirating (possibility of low quality, no seeders, sketchy websites). Of course this isn't to say this is how cable companies should exactly go about solving their problem, but by cracking down on their PAYING subscribers, they will drive more people NOT less to either pirate, or share passwords.
- _asummers 9y agoThey did this while also shoving out Family Plans which are by far best bang for your buck in Spotify subscription plans, amortized over 4 or 5 friends.
- adrr 9y agoSpotify's way of handling is completely terrible and i am very tempted to cancel. I have a bunch of Echo's around my house and the Spotify family plan which i share with my wife . My wife can't play music on our the Amazon Echo if i am using Spotify elsewhere on my phone, or laptop because of the one account one stream rule Spotify implements.. You can't create fake accounts for your Echo's, they actually make an effort to verify you actually exist with some identity database. All to prevent a legitimate customer from being able to use their service.
- figgis 9y agoHave you even tried searching your problem..? https://www.spotify.com/us/family/ https://www.spotify.com/us/family/ https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Family-Premium-multiple-devices-playing-own-music-simultaneously/td-p/1349248 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/Family-Premium-mul...
- 9y ago
- kabdib 9y ago> "The CEO has said that one unidentified channel owner had 30,000 simultaneous streams from a single account." This is more about bad implementation (and possibly design) than anything else, then. ALL of the other online services I've worked on have had a reasonable and enforced policy here. It's not that hard to do (there are harder corner cases if you do allow customers to do things like family sharing, but it's still not rocket surgery).
- elyrly 9y agosounds like someone is streaming their account..
- chrisBob 9y agoNo problem. I want to stream the Olympic Channel, and I even pay $100 for a cable subscription that includes it. Oh, I can't stream it though. Uverse only lets me stream from 3 of the NBC Sports channels, and not that one. Guess I am going to just cancel the cable I pay for and use someone else's Comcast login instead. I don't mind paying for streaming service, and when HBO cracked down I bought a subscription that night. But some services you can't even pay for if Comcast doesn't run cable to your house.
- Klathmon 9y agoI don't like pirating content. I feel it's akin to stealing even though nothing physical is "stolen". (not trying to impose this on anyone else, this is just a personal belief of mine) However there is one exception, and it's when a company will not allow me to purchase a tv show or movie. All too many times I've watched seasons 1-4 of a show on something like Netflix, only to find that the most recent 4 episodes of season 6 are on a cable "on demand" service, and season 5 is only available as a DVD box set purchase, with the first half of season 6 literally 100% unavailable anywhere. I want to pay for their product, they have the product, in most cases they created the product! But they aren't selling it because of reasons that I honestly don't care about any more. I will happily steal that content without remorse.
- QAPereo 9y agoThe BBC is an excellent example of doing it wrong, and giving me the choice between nothing, and piracy.
- exhilaration 9y agoHave you looked at https://acorn.tv/ https://acorn.tv/
- QAPereo 9y agoThanks, I agree that’s one of the best ways to access that content, but they can do so much better!
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThe screams of a slowly dying business model. This is what I expect them to be very effective at shutting down sharing streams, and then getting a small boost of new subscribers, followed by an increase in the rate at which subscribership goes down. And as the revenue falls, and contracts expire, more and more companies will skip the 'middle man' of the cable provider and offer their stuff on aggregating services like Apple TV, Roku, or Amazon Video.
- BrianGragg 9y agoMost of the money you pay into your cable company goes to the broadcasters and not the cable company. Thats why cable companies have so many strange fee's. Thats about the only way they can make profits. -Not saying its right, or that I support their model. Nor do I agree with how much profits they are garnering off people with no choice in most places.
- Crespyl 9y agoIs that mostly going to broadcasters of things I actually want to watch, or the ocean of random channels that I have no interest in but are always included?
- fapjacks 9y agoActually, if you dig into the documents, you'll discover that cable companies make thin margins on their television/content broadcasting, but they make orders of magnitude worth of margins on providing broadband internet service. I pay Spectrum about $90/month for something which costs them literally just over a single dollar/month.
- rednerrus 9y agoI am going to cancel my cable if I have to reenter my password more often. It's already a huge pain in the ass.
- teilo 9y ago> About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don’t live with, according to Parks Associates. I call bullsh*t.
- megaman22 9y agoIf they cut the shit and stop splicing the same 3-4 minute ad cut into their on-demand streams every five minutes, maybe we can talk. Especially if they cut the ad providers that go ass-over-bean-box on 50% of their loads, forcing you to reload the stream, and rewatch the same show about eight times to get to the end, because they have disabled fast-forwarding and seeking.
- kodablah 9y ago> But the prevalence of password sharing suggests many of those customers [...] are watching popular shows [...] for free, robbing pay-TV providers and programmers of [...] advertising dollars. Can someone help me understand how it is robbing them of advertising dollars? I understand it's robbing them of fees (though I don't like the double-dip model and especially loathe the concept of retransmission fees). But I don't understand how more "free" eyeballs are costing advertising dollars. In fact, I would think more eyeballs would be an advertiser's goal.
- The_Egg_Man 9y agoThey probably get advertising dollars per subscriber. The people stealing passwords arent counted as subscribers so they dont get revenue for those.
- kodablah 9y agoAh, so they are being "robbed of advertising dollars" because they assume that password stealers would otherwise be legitimate subscribers? Ha. In the meantime, a non-subscriber viewing something isn't technically taking anyone's money and this type of weasel-wording keeps public opinion against them. Also, they would be wise to get advertising dollars per viewer as TV streams are often legally multiplexed in a household. This had traditionally been the case in the pre-digital world w/ Nielsen ratings.
- whiddershins 9y agoThis is a false premise, if they actually sell that way. Newspapers used to estimate IIRC that each paper was viewed by an average of three people, therefore the advertising “reach” was standardized as such. It’s all a bit arbitrary, in the case of paying for eyeballs, as opposed to clicks. The only revenue they are losing that is real revenue is subscription revenue.
- bcg1 9y ago> About one-third of internet users stream cable TV without paying for it by using credentials of someone they don't live with There is no way this is true. Not saying that it isn't a problem, but statements like the above are approaching the same level of BS as when the ad industry says most people would prefer to trade their privacy for the privilege of being manipulated by targeted ads.
- rconti 9y agoMaybe "one third of internet users WHO stream cable TV do so without paying for it" ?
- Feniks 9y agoExpected, after the VPN crackdown.
- shmerl 9y agoPretty dumb, like most "anti-piracy" time wasting. They should start releasing video DRM-free, if they want to do anything positive about it.
- ivanbakel 9y ago>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. This kind of diktat is actually pretty comical. Social consensus is pretty clear on how little people care about this, but for cable companies isn't not only a profit impact but a deep moral wrong. Might they not have more success by understanding exactly this disconnect in mentalities over streaming services, rather than trying to pump petulant propaganda?
- pessimizer 9y ago> Might they not have more success by understanding exactly this disconnect in mentalities over streaming services There's no disconnect, because they don't actually believe this. It's just the line they're using, and the line that their lobbyists and lawyers will use. Until there's a robust technical solution (maybe facial registration?), they need to try social and legal ways to maintain and boost their margins.
- gumby 9y agoThis is absurd: I pay for two simultaneous streams on Netflix and thats what they give me. What businesses is it of theirs who is watching them? My car has two seats: it's none of the manufacturer's business who sits in which seat. We shouldn't let these self-righteous selfish neanderthals try to justify their egregious rent-seeking.