Now at today’s UBS Global TMT Conference, Tom Rutledge is going after Disney+ and others because they allow more than two streams per household. Mr. Rutlege’s complaint is that most households only have about two people in them so when services that offer more than two streams it encourages password sharing. He specifically listed the ability to stream Disney+ on four devices at once when explaining why this leads to password sharing.
“…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,” Ruttledge said during the recent earnings call. “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.”
Spectrum reached out to say that they did not target a specific streaming service but talked about streaming in general after the 3rd quarter earnings call.
Spectrum seems to think that password sharing is the main cause of their subscriber loss. The hope here seems to be that if they can crack down on password sharing they could reduce their subscriber losses.
To crackdown on password sharing, Spectrum has teamed up with FOX, Disney, and ACE. Exactly how they plan to work together to block password sharing is unknown but reports are that they hope to exchange data about who is using logins for 3rd party apps from these different services.
The question now is how successful will they be. Only time will tell, but it seems that Spectrum hopes that this new effort to block password sharing will help reduce cord cutting.
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