Streaming companies plot a crackdown on password… | Little White Lies

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Stream­ing com­pa­nies plot a crack­down on pass­word sharing

19 Aug 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

Disney+ logo with Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars branding on a purple background.
Disney+ logo with Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars branding on a purple background.
Our free­load­ing days may soon be com­ing to an end.

It’s one of those harm­less bare­ly-even-a-crimes, like jay­walk­ing or sneak­ing into an R‑rated movie, and we’re all guilty of it. But the big stream­ing play­ers and the remain­ing ves­tiges of cable TV are join­ing forces to put the kibosh on password-sharing.

A new item from Giz­mo­do delves into the fin­er points of a recent press release com­ing from Dis­ney+ and Char­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the most alarm­ing of which con­cerns a plan to put an end to the hal­cy­on days of mooching off of our par­ents’ accounts. This is the demise of MoviePass all over again – no good thing can last.

The release places an empha­sis on pira­cy mit­i­ga­tion,” with a spe­cif­ic inten­tion to reduce unau­tho­rized access and pass­word shar­ing.” On the one hand, we may soon be pay­ing a lot more fees to the stream­ing over­lords, but on the oth­er, all this talk of unau­tho­rized access makes free­load­ers sound like com­put­er hackers.

The tech­nol­o­gy by which this could be made pos­si­ble has yet to be revealed, though Gizmodo’s item does cite a recent arti­cle spec­u­lat­ing that track­ing and cross-ref­er­enc­ing user IP address­es could be an effect method of mon­i­tor­ing activ­i­ty. Big Brother’s com­ing, and he wants twelve quid or so per month.

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