On streaming platforms, the difficult fight against account sharing
[ad_1]
And if the famous “can you send me your Netflix codes?” was living his last months? In any case, this is the wish of the American leader in streaming. On March 17, the platform announced in a press release that it wanted to tax consumers who connect with other people’s codes. In the test state since that date in several Latin American countries, the measure could apply to French accounts, says management. However, no date has been set as its implementation is proving complex.
The stakes are high for Netflix. If the platform has 220 million subscribers worldwide, 100 million users use the password of a relative. They only applied the recommendations of the American group, which had encouraged this practice in its infancy, as evidenced by a tweet from March 10, 2017: “Love is sharing your password. » Today, the context has changed. Competitors like Prime Video, MyCanal, Disney+, OCS and HBO have moved in, and the industry pioneer recorded a loss of 970,000 subscribers between the end of March and the end of June. These millions of users benefiting from shared accounts therefore represent a significant potential market.
But how to spot them? For the time being, the American giant explains that it uses the IP address of televisions to detect the presence of several households on the same account. A method still under discussion which should be refined over the coming months, according to Netflix. For now, mobile devices like phones, tablets and laptops are spiraling out of control.
Prevention message
Difficult, with such an arsenal, to differentiate sharing deemed illegal from legal sharing between members of the same family, for example. If a parent subscribes to a Premium subscription for the whole family, what if a member is going to live in another city? What happens to a child of divorcees? What if users go on vacation? Netflix argues that all the hypotheses are on the table, without giving details on the possible detection methods.
“For this to work, a huge after-sales service would have to be set up which would deal with situations on a case-by-case basis”, confides Julien Pillot, professor of digital economy at the National Institute of Advanced Economic and Commercial Studies. On the side of the competitors, no clear strategy is emerging for the moment. MyCanal, which has 21.8 million subscribers worldwide, simply displays a warning message and cuts the image every quarter of an hour in the event of excessive simultaneous connections.
You have 16.92% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
[ad_2]
Source link