Are you the leech who uses your friend's Netflix account without paying your way? Well, lap it up while you can leech, because it could be about to get a lot harder to account share.
A London-based company named Synamedia is reportedly planning to launch an AI-based service that cracks down on password sharing.
The service, which is dubbed Credentials Sharing Insights, will use new software in order to figure out which users have logged in to which accounts and quickly flag shared ones.
Unveiled at the Consumer Electronics 2019 Show (CES) in Las Vegas by video software provider Synamedia, the new invention is reportedly aimed at the alleged 26 per cent of millennials who give out their credentials for video streaming services to other people.
However, Synamedia - which intends to empower Pay TV operators and video streaming websites - isn't just for small-time fee avoiders. The company has claimed that the system can also be used to track down large-scale for-profit operations.
It will reportedly use behavioural analytics and machine learning to check up on credentials-sharing activity.
The new system will let the operator specify exactly how many people should be using one account and then monitor a subscriber database for any fraudulent activity.
In an interview with Variety, Symanedia chief product officer Jean-Marc Racine claimed the focus was "on friends and family "taking their [users'] generosity a bit too far" in an age where TV operators can no longer rely on secure devices like locked-down set-top boxes and smart cards to decrypt satellite TV.
"The way you secure OTT is evolving," he said. "Passwords are easy to share."
With Parks Associates recently estimating that the industry could stand to lose as much as $9.9 billion due to password sharing by 2021, the new software is perhaps likely to be welcomed by streaming services such as Netflix and Amaz0n.
Jean-Marc Racine, CPO of Synamedia, said: "Casual credentials sharing is becoming too expensive to ignore. Our new solution gives operators the ability to take action. Many casual users will be happy to pay an additional fee for a premium, shared service with a greater number of concurrent users. It's a great way to keep honest people honest while benefiting from an incremental revenue stream."
However, the news wasn't taken well by people around the world who use streaming devices on a regular basis. In fact, many of them slammed the new development, with one claiming "They always find a way to ruin everything."
"So you can’t go have a movie night at a friends' now and use your Netflix, how stupid," another person added, while a third joked: "What I wonder how they will survive on 10 legit accounts?? [sic]"
There has been no comment so far from Netflix, Amazon, NowTV or any other streaming device as to whether they will be using the software.
.jpg_uectls?tr=h-184)