Password sharing crackdown

If you found a way to get free cable television service, what would you do? Would you use it? Would you feel guilty? Or would you blab about it on social media and ruin it for everyone else? Apparently, most of you would do the most latter. In a Bloomberg report that calls the sharing of passwords for streaming services a 10 billion dollar problem for TV networks, you have outed the rest of us that knew how to keep quiet about a good thing.

Tom Rutledge, CEO of everyone’s favorite content delivery service, Charter Communications, is claiming that one user credentials for streaming had over 30,000 simultaneous streams. As the cable companies gasp for sweet life while drowning in their own inequities, they are going on a hunt for password sharers. Cable and satellite carriers are claiming that the loss of 3 million customers, just this year, have put them in a position that requires they protect their revenue streams, most specifically in the form of cracking down on pirating and streaming with other user’s credentials. What they won’t be attempting to make their outdated product better and more competitive in the mobile and internet streaming market. Why would they do that when they can simply harass their existing users?

Instead of do something like, I don’t know, offer a product people want to purchase at a price that is determined by market factors, they instead want to do what anti-piracy advocates have always done: Make it much harder for people who actually pay for their service to enjoy it. They seriously think this is the answer to their woes! Anyone remember Sony installing rootkits on people’s computers to fuck with your ability to copy cd’s? This and many other examples of anti-piracy non-sense is the road these hacks are trying to hoe, as if it hasn’t already been paved into a super-highway of complete failure stretching all the way back to Napster.

Cable companies are asking their content providers to ask existing users to log in more frequently, and decrease the number of simultaneous streams that can be used. ESPN already reduced their concurrent streams from 10 down to 5. No one watches ESPN since they decided to get involved in politics instead of sports so, clearly, no one gave a shit. The same exact number of shits anyone is giving about Spectrum, a company that made “a record 535,000,000$” in free cash flow per their 2016 annual report to investors. They desperately need the money. /s

It would be a damn shame if cable companies really did start offering streaming services, paid for by ad revenue. They’d have nothing to bitch about. It’s not like there is any precedent for this sort of service…  How on earth could it be successful?  Combine the absurdity of my line of questioning with the fact that discontinuing the transmission of television through their cable lines, would free up all that bandwidth they’re accusing me and the two other people who use over a terabyte a month of data in my state of using. Stream all your content, not just internet but television, through your lines and cut out broadcast television altogether. People are already not watching your ads because you give them DVRs. The cable companies need to realize that they’re losing money because no one values the product they are selling any longer. Until the figure this out, they will continue to atrophy as they hold onto the one way they know how to make money; Screwing consumers who actually pay for their outmoded service.