Last week Spectrum held its 3rd quarter 2019 earnings call. During that call, executives from Spectrum took a question about their recent deal with Disney to crack down on password sharing.
In the answer, a senior Spectrum executive blamed the growing problem of password sharing on live TV streaming services that offer streaming on up to five devices at once. That comment can only be directed at PlayStation Vue as they are the only service that offers a five device streaming feature.
Spectrum executives also went on to complain about how these live TV streaming services don’t geo lock their content allowing subscribers to share passwords with people who don’t live in the house.
“…streaming products have been sold with five streams and with no location based kind of security. Most households in the United States have two or less people in them. And as a result of that, there are more streams than there are households available for free.” Said Spectrums CEO Tom Ruttledge. “And by sharing passwords and by not having location based or subscriber based relationships with those streams, and the fact that TV everywhere allows for massive numbers of streams replicated through virtual MVPDs and so forth. There are — it’s just too easy to get the product without paying for it.”
Update: Spectrum reached out to say that they did not target a specific streaming service but talked about streaming in general.
The strange thing here is services like PlayStation Vue and Hulu actually do aggressively lock down their content. It was not that long ago that you could only watch PlayStation Vue on a streaming player inside your home network. Now they have very aggressive limitations on the ability to stream outside of your home network. Hulu does not let live TV customers use the Hulu app on streaming players outside of their home network.
Spectrum’s argument is there would be a lot more people subscribing to TV services if streaming services like PlayStation Vue more aggressively locked down their accounts.
Password sharing seems to be more of an issue for cable TV companies who don’t lock down access to their apps properly. Many cord cutters find their cable TV logins work on network apps for months after they cancel. Yet it seems Spectrum wants to blame streaming services like PlayStation Vue because of password sharing.
What do you think of Spectrum’s complaints about PlayStation Vue? Leave us a comment and let us know.
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