Cable CEO Is Really Pissed That HBO Hasn't Cracked Down On Streaming Password Sharing
from the get-over-it dept
As HBO's streaming service popularity has taken off, the company has yet to crack down on the sharing of passwords, believing it's a great opportunity to have programming junkies market the brand for you. We all of course already knew that sharing HBO Go passwords was a violation of the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA and an unholy sin. But according to Charter CEO Tom Rutledge, the sharing of streaming service passwords is also a diabolical theft of content that needs to stop immediately.During the cable giant's recent quarterly earnings call, Rutledge decided to rant a bit about the perceived injustice of college students using their parents' passwords, insisting that HBO's leniency on this front showed a complete misundertanding of the market:
"But to Rutledge, companies like HBO show a "complete lack of control and understanding in the space" by letting password sharing continue, and it's something that must be stopped. "The lack of control over the content by content companies and authentication processes has reduced the demand for video because you don’t have to pay for it,” Mr. Rutledge said on the earnings call. “That’s going on in the college market."But it's Rutledge who appears to have shown his lack of understanding of the market he serves. The CEO assumes that if you crack down on college kids sharing HBO passwords that these kids are magically going to go out and sign up for cable connections. What's more likely to happen should you crack down on the practice is that that these kids (most of whom are on a budget) will turn to cheaper streaming alternatives like Netflix -- or piracy. But in traditional legacy exec thinking, everybody's a criminal, even though Rutledge's company simply refuses to seriously compete on price.
Earlier this year HBO CEO Richard Plepler said the company keeps a close eye on the password sharing stats, and it's not really a significant number of people. Plepler (the guy Rutledge implies doesn't understand the market) a year earlier made it clear he understood the market perfectly well:
"It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, it just has no impact on the business,” HBO CEO Richard Plepler said. It is, in many ways, a “terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers,” he said, noting that it could potentially lead to more subscribers in the future. “We’re in the business of creating addicts,” he said.So, whereas HBO thinks it's a good idea to turn the other cheek on a statistically insignificant practice to generate brand obsession, Charter (soon to own Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in a $75+ billion merger) thinks it's a better idea to treat college kids like criminals, and in the process, driving them to Netflix and BitTorrent networks.
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Filed Under: cable, competition, hbo, password sharing, streaming, tom rutledge
Companies: charter, hbo
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'Don't worry your head HBO, I'll be angry for you!'
Unless I'm missing something significant, said content and content companies are HBO's content and HBO respectively, who if anything seem to have no problem with what's going on. If HBO wants to shoot itself in the foot, or more accurately draw in more future subscribers, then I'm not seeing what ground the CEO of a completely different company has to be upset.
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Ah
Thinking long-term works fine for HBO, but if it means that Rutledge is getting less business now, then it makes sense that he'd throw a fit over it. His claims about HBO not 'understanding the market' may not stand up under scrutiny, but his motivation for making those claims at least makes perfect sense.
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Re: Ah
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Its not piracy, the account holder is paying for the service.
If its anything like Netflix then multiple logins at the same time are limited.
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I have no issues with a household having one login and sharing it amongst everyone who lives there. But as much as I think 'must own everything' is stupid, even I agree that 10 or 12 unrelated people who don't live together (or at best, are in a dorm situation) sharing passwords is piracy.
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Wow, so that as a kid sharing the cost of a pizza or takeout dinner or renting a van or bus was piracy. I didn't know the Boy Scouts were such blatant pirates. Then again the youngest ones are indoctrinated with the heresy of Sharing Sharing Sharing.
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Which makes literally no economic sense. Having less demand is better than having no demand.
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Your logic fails because you are taking a fixed supply (1 pizza with 12 slices) that has a specific lifetime, and applying it to a non-finite source.
If instead, the Netflix account had '100 hours of streaming a month' I would absolutely agree with you that you could do whatever you wanted with that 100 hours.
There has to be a balance between consumer and producer. If the producer is too insane (which Rutlidge obviously is), then nobody respects the company and is happy to see them go out of business.
The attitude that it's fine to buy one netflix account and spread it out amongst a dozen people because 'it is just like buying a pizza' is a result of over-reach by copyright maximalists. But it doesn't mean that is a correct method of thought.
The problem with this type of response is, you are going anti-copyright maximalist, which just encourages Rutledge to insist on every individual must have a separate account, and demand hundreds of thousands if you and your wife watch at the same time but she doesn't have an account.
People need to be reasonable on both sides. Unfortunately, being reasonable is not en vogue lately. :(
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Rather than whining that every one of those people should have been buying their own copy and coming up with way to force that, the newspaper industry realised that this was reducing their upfront printing costs - and expanding the number of eyeballs for classified and other advertising. They also recognised the brand awareness it creates - most of those people would not depend solely on the free copy and they would most likely buy the paper they were familiar with from the freebies over a less familiar competitor.
Of course, that model is now dated, but when the business realities of the time dictated that was the best model, they generally accepted it and worked with it rather than forcing sales that may not be possible.
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Now, depending on how their TOS is worded I can see it being a violation of said TOS to share the password like that, but piracy? No.
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(Admittedly I have personally only seen the concurrent user limit warning once)
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Depends on your plan. You can be logged in to any number of devices, but your plan will limit the number of devices that can stream simultaneously.
Apart from that limit, they don't seem to mind where the devices are located. I once accidentally left my account logged into a friend's computer in a different country and they used it to catch up on a couple of TV shows before I asked them to log out.
"even I agree that 10 or 12 unrelated people who don't live together (or at best, are in a dorm situation) sharing passwords is piracy."
I disagree strongly, and let's stop muddying clear terms even more than they are. Piracy = not paying. This is paying, but potentially using the service in violation of the T&Cs of the provider. A contract breach is not piracy.
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But what distinguishes copy protection laws from contract law is if I buy a song from you and agree not to give it to anyone else and then I do give it to some else who agreed to nothing the law can then go after the person I gave it to if they decide to redistribute it. The agreement was only between me and the person that sold me the content and so, at least in terms of contract theory and the concept that we should be allowed to make agreements that should be honored, the law should only allow them to go after me and not everyone else that agreed to nothing.
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But, if you do, I have no idea what it might be because your post is impossible to read. It's as if mini black outs are f##king with my mind.
Please, if you need to post, post coherently.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ah
Second sentence first paragraph should read
If I write a book and I sell you a copy under the agreement that you* don't resell ...
Second paragraph first sentence "some else" should read "someone else".
Hope that helps.
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My point is - we're already dealing with people who insist on equating piracy with theft even though they are totally different concepts. No need to muddy the waters by lumping in paying customers as well.
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Those 10 or 12 people living together won't be living together forever. They'll each be getting their own accounts after college.
Deny their piracy now, and they'll find other ways to entertain themselves and you've lost them forever.
If I were HBO, I'd be giving college dorms free accounts.
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Netflix limits the number of devices that can be used with a single account to five.
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Re: 'Don't worry your head HBO, I'll be angry for you!'
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Re: 'Don't worry your head HBO, I'll be angry for you!'
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Re: 'Don't worry your head HBO, I'll be angry for you!'
campaign is luring customers away.
Competition, especially when you never dealt with it before sucks !
Whining just makes customers happier to see Charter lose.
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I'm sure he didn't mean to say "demand" in that context. Maybe the pool of people "willing" to pay for it, but certainly not demand. The sharing may reduce the demand for *cable* but not for video.
""It’s not that we’re unmindful of it, it just has no impact on the business,”... noting that it could potentially lead to more subscribers in the future."
..and there we have one of the most sensible things said on this subject by a legacy provider. Parents aren't going to share their passwords forever. Once the student graduates, they're most likely to turn to the services they're most familiar/happy with. If HBO gets them now, then after graduation they'll have 2 sets of subscribers (the parents and the student). Treat them poorly, and you may only have one (or zero, if the parents can't justify the premium now that less people are using it).
This, of course, is a long-term strategy that requires understanding of your audience, so it's not surprising that some in the industry are able to think that way. But, kudos to Plepler for understanding that.
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All three of them are now subscribers of their own.
Net result: More money for Netflix.
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Unless it's Game of Thrones sharing. Then it's the Hammer of Justice rammed up your ass.
The proof is in the actions, not the words.
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That quote alone tells me HBO knows what it's doing. They're pulling the long con and they know college kids tend to mooch of their parents. So, when their parents cut them off in a few years, they're still going to want to watch their Game of Thrones and HBO now is more convenient than piracy. Guess what they do then?
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Which is he complaining about?
If it is college kids with the password for their home account then that seems exactly what that is designed for. While in college they are still in most cases for legal purposed residing at their parent's house. The HBO login is designed to allow you to watch content while away from home. The fact that they are away from home for four years is only a detail.
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Re: Which is he complaining about?
This, and the fact that most Dorms won't allow you to wire cable or run satellite dishes. They may have cable, but in many dorms I've been to, the cable is run to a central location or a "break" area and not into the rooms themselves. Unless you are in a new or newly remodeled dorm, you don't have cable, wired internet, etc.
You have wireless, offered by the school, or you have a central area where you can sit and watch cable.
Cutting off access to HBO isn't going to make students go out and buy a connection because they can't. Just like anyone who has lived in a old apartment complex or a high-rent Home-Owners Association development...you can't just go out and buy cable unless city hall lets you, and you can't fight city hall.
By keeping the students hooked while they are in school, HBO only assures that they stay hooked when they move out. Cable CEO is the one who has lost all sense of marketing reality and just is in it for the short term greed and not looking at the long game.
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It's HBO's business
Rutledge is just pissed that a historically cable staple, HBO, is expanding in a market that really doesn't need cable anymore.
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sharing is illegal?
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Re: sharing is illegal?
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What may also happen is that some of their parents will stop subscribing to the services. For instance we have a Netflix account of four and everyone that uses it splits the bill. Chances are that some of those kids also do the same with their parents and part of the reason they get it is because they have the opportunity to share usage. Cracking down on it may make the HBO offer less convenient to those that don't share their passwords (more security = more inconvenience to legitimate users) and it will make it less likely that more than one person will pitch in to share an account resulting in fewer subscriptions.
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Reaching an unreachable market
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Who the hell do you think provides the bandwidth so you can stream your HULU/HBO/Netflix/XBOX/PS4 or whatever else you want?
Ummmm, the cable company. Cord cutting? Ha.
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Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)
If you don't believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”
A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that “piracy” and “theft” are smear-words.
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Piracy is actually kinda romantic.
Later, Oyster Pirates would fish for oysters without rights (used to secure a monopoly to inflate oyster prices) so that restaurants and their customers could enjoy oysters at a reasonable price.
And now, media pirates (in Europe, simply the sharing community) provide media access to those who can't afford the prices set by the studios and labels that they haven't paid for, themselves, not only ripping off the artists via Hollywood Accounting but also demanding that everyone re-purchase media with every new conveyance system (45, LP, CD, DVD, Blu-Ray, .mp3 et al).
The molestations of the sea by jolly pirates are nothing compared to the molestations of the world by the emperors in Hollywood.
So some of us are glad to chip away at their fat and ill-gotten profits.
Hey ho ho
You`ll cruise to foreign shores
And you`ll keep your mind and body sound
By working out of doors
True friendship and adventure are what we can`t live without
And when you`re a professional pirate
That`s what the job`s about!
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Nothing Happens in a Vaccum
HBO WANTS them to embrace their service. They want it bundled even. So, either Charter's CEO is not wanting to partner with them because they don't fight "piracy", and using that as his excuse, or perhaps he's mad because he didn't partner with them when he could.
Either way, I have a great idea! Let's demonize one of major cost upgrade services we've used to sell and bundle and upsell for years! It's brilliant! HBO has made them tons of money, and this is how they reacted. Spoiled much?
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Holly shit!
no TV for my kids, only pre- WWII books
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