Cable Companies Threatening Customers Over Password Sharing

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Instead of coming up with ways to lure customers back, companies like Comcast have gone in an opposite direction.

With reports of nearly one million subscribers cutting the cord and freeing themselves from traditional cable every month—it comes as no surprise that cable companies are taking drastic measures. Instead of coming up with ways to lure customers back, companies like Comcast have gone in an opposite direction.

Not only have Comcast and competing cable networks raised prices of both their internet and their cable packages, they’re now targeting existing customers who subscribe to streaming services.

Every year, millions of streaming subscribers share passwords with friends, family, and even random strangers on social media sites. This has worked to allow millions of people to completely bypass cable charges.

Tom Rutledge, CEO of Charter Communications Inc., is heading the fight against password sharing. Charter Communications markets cable TV services under the name Spectrum, and the company has felt the loss after another year with a steady migration of customers to streaming services.

In a conference earlier this month, Rutledge addressed the issue, saying—

“There’s lots of extra streams, there’s lots of extra passwords, there’s lots of people who could get free service.”

He went on to say that they had discovered one streaming account that had over 30,000 people watching off of a single subscription. This is a problem that many streaming services have tackled by limiting the number of screens that can be assigned to one password.

Companies like Disney have begun to study password sharing before they even release their streaming services in the hopes of ending the problem before it starts. They recently performed a survey that confirmed that most users admit to sharing their passwords at least once during their subscriptions to streaming services.

In answer to this, many popular streaming services had limited the number of screens that can use a subscription at any given time. The more screens a subscriber wants to add to their plan, the more expensive the service is.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t have an influence on which screens are in use at one time. A person could easily “borrow” a password in order to watch a one-time sporting event or premier without ever being detected.

Industry leaders are calling this piracy, and are taking a no tolerance approach to password sharing. No one is exactly sure what action they can take, as the issue is so widespread and almost impossible to track and prove.

According to a report released by Bloomberg Technology, “For now, the industry can’t agree on a crucial question: How many people should stream from one account while also preventing widespread password swapping? The policies among pay-TV operators, programmers and streaming services vary.”