Netflix has revealed it is 'monitoring' people who hand out their passwords to their family and friends.
The company's chief product officer, Greg Peters, said on a vlog last week he would try to find 'consumer-friendly' ways to stop groups of people sharing one subscription.
The video-streaming service currently costs between £5.99 and £11.99, with the option to watch up to four screens at a time.
But as long as they're not all watching at the same time, more people can use the same login as long as they know the username and password.
Speaking in a video interview about Netflix's earnings in the third quarter of 2019, Mr Peters was asked what the company planned to do about password sharing.
He said: 'We continue to monitor it so we're looking at the situation and we'll see [whether there are] consumer-friendly ways to push on the edge of that but I think we've got no big plans to announce at this point in time of doing something differently there.'
His interviewer suggested Netflix would need to be aggressive to crack down but avoid 'alienating' its users.
Sharing passwords among groups of people ends up leaving Netflix out of pocket because all those users are people who won't buy their own subscription.
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However, the company must keep flexibility so families can share subscriptions across multiple devices in the same household, for example.
Netflix already limits how many people can use a single account – users must pay extra if they want to have three separate screens in use at the same time.
A possible technology which could be used to monitor users is AI which can work out how many people are associated with a single account.
For example, at the consumer technology conference, CES 2019, in Las Vegas in January, experts unveiled an AI-powered system designed to crack down on account sharing.
Video software provider Synamedia said roughly 26 per cent of millennials give out the credentials for video streaming services to other people.
And its new software will be able to analyse which users are logged in and where to quickly flag shared accounts.
Additional research found that by 2021, credentials sharing would account for $9.9billion (£7.6bn) of losses in pay-TV revenues.
The software – Synamedia Credentials Sharing Insight – uses behavioural analytics and machine learning to keep tabs on credentials-sharing activity across streaming services.
The system allows the operator to specify how many users should be using a single account - useful for family sharing accounts, for instance.
The AI can then monitor a subscriber database for any potential fraudulent activity.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
