Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Netflix Password Sharing: Is It Piracy?

An article by MarketWatch includes comments from Goldman Sachs Analyst Heath Terry, who suggests the possible intent of Netflix behind targeting the HD plan. “We believe a targeted price change like this is designed to reduce excessive password sharing by incentivizing users to switch to the 1-screen plan,” Terry said.

The price of both single screen streaming plans and the two-screen HD plan is the same at $7.99. An important question is whether password sharing outside the home is really a piracy threat to major companies like Netflix.

The answer to this is no, but this does not mean that it is not prevalent, the report says. In a study earlier this year, Parks Associates found that nearly 57% of the U.S. households access an over-the-top video account, which could be Netflix, Hulu or HBO Go, but 11% of Netflix, 10% of Hulu Plus and 5% of Amazon Prime Instant Video subscribers make use of an account for which payments are made by someone else.

From the article "Netflix Password Sharing: Is It Piracy?" by Aman Jain.

Previously In The News

AT&T Deal: Merger For New Media Era Or A Bad Remake?

Pay-TV operators are seeing a "slow erosion of the core business," analyst Brett Sappington at Parks Associates said. "After years of attempts to be more than just a 'dumb pipe,' pay-TV operators h...

Google's Next Chromecast Could Look More Like a Roku Box

Things have changed. Parks Associates analysis in 2014 found that Chromecast had replaced Apple TV in second place behind Roku. Its market share was 20%. In 2019, though, Parks Associates found that o...

The World Just Moved One Step Closer To Cord-Cutter Utopia

That leaves local broadcast TV. Access to NBC, ABC, and all the rest remains the biggest impediment to cutting the cord for good. Parks Associates recently found that 55 percent of cable subscribers s...

DirecTV Wants To Be The Online Substitute For Cable

But analysts estimate that Sling has racked up fewer than 1 million subscribers since it launched in February 2015. Vue’s numbers are harder to get a handle on, but it’s not on the list of top 10 most...