A new report suggests Netflix could be losing up to $2.3 billion annually to password sharing.
According to a study by CordCutting.com, as many as one in five viewers are logging in to Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu using someone else’s password (the study calls these viewers ‘moochers’).
In the US, where the basic subscription to Netflix was $7.99 at the time the survey was conducted, the streamer could have been losing at least $192 million in monthly revenue, leading to the billion dollar figure for annual revenue.
According to the study, 59.3 per cent of respondents said they would pay for Netflix (or around 14 million people), contributing at least $112 million in monthly revenue, if they lost access. And 37.8 per cent, or 2 million, said they’d pay for Hulu; 27.6 per cent, or 1 million people, said they’d pay for Prime Video.
Meanwhile, Akamai’s State of Internet / Security: Retail Attacks and API Traffic Report found that streaming media services suffered over eight billion ‘credential stuffing’ attempts between May and December 2018. It describes credential stuffing as attempts by bots to access a user’s payment details.
