Nordic password sharing costing annual €250m

Subscription video on demand services in the Nordics are losing a combined €250 million through the illegal sharing of passwords.

An investigation by the Stockholm-based consultancy Mediavision has found up to 40% of subscribers admit to sharing a password to a standalone SVOD service with someone outside their household. Shared passwords are especially common among the young, as high as up to 60% among the 15-24 age bracket.

Sharing of passwords also increases with ‘stacking’, the concept of subscribing to more than one streaming service, the more services that are stacked, the greater propensity to share the password.

Netflix, which this week began trialling a new system to prevent sharing outside the subscribing family, has approximately 40% of subscribing households sharing passwords outside the household. Broadband TV News