What Crackdown? 14% of Netflix Users Still Sign on With Shared Passwords

pcmag.com:

The account-sharing crackdown that Netflix announced almost a year ago and started implementing in the spring has yet to scare most account borrowers into paying up. But it probably makes business sense anyway, according to a new survey from MoffettNathanson.

That market-research firm commissioned Publishers Clearing House (yes, the company does things besides run a sweepstakes that sends giant replica checks to people’s front doors) to survey 19,000 Americans in Q3 about their usage of the video-streaming service. The first takeaway: Most Netflix viewers watch by the rules.

A full 77% of respondents say they only use their own account, while 8% sometimes lean on somebody else’s subscription (the report doesn’t get into why), and 14% only watch on other people’s accounts.

In most cases, account sharing is a family affair: Parent-child sharing makes up 42%, siblings comprise 24%, and other family ties account for 17%. The report warns of a potential gap between how Netflix defines a household—”people who live together in one household,” per its documentation—and the more flexible definitions these viewers may prefer. 

But the bigger short-term issue for Netflix is that most account borrowers haven’t gotten any sort of nastygram from the company yet. Only 23% say they’d gotten a warning about their usage, although 72% of those recipients had since gotten locked out of their borrowed account. The report doesn’t discuss whether any of these viewers had tried workarounds to evade Netflix’s sharing countermeasures.

Those numbers suggest that the slow implementation of this crackdown Netflix described in July—when co-CEO Greg Peters said on its Q2 earnings call that it’s being “applied gradually”—hasn’t picked up much speed