No TV? No Subscription? No Problem

[Commentary] Sharing password information to Internet streaming sites and services appears increasingly prevalent among Web-savvy people who don’t own televisions or subscribe to cable.

It’s hard to know exactly how common it is: traditional analytics firms like Nielsen and comScore can’t track it, and cultural research organizations like Pew haven’t done extensive surveying about it. An informal BuzzFeed survey, which was a partial inspiration for this column, found that several dozen people in its office used someone else’s account information for HBO Go. And based on countless anecdotes, conversations, tweets and text messages, such behavior seems to be on the rise. “It also seems like a pretty serious problem,” wrote John Herrman, a senior editor at BuzzFeed and author of the polling report. “While our office is fairly young and not representative of HBO’s broader customer base, it is representative of a rising generation of people who 1) like watching HBO shows and 2) cannot fathom paying for them.” Do the companies, particularly HBO, view this as especially problematic? I hesitated before asking, worried that any inquiries would prompt a crackdown, with the result that I’d become the most-hated person on the Internet. But to the collective relief of nearly everyone I know, the companies with whom I spoke seemed to have little to no interest in curbing our sharing behavior — in part because they can’t. They have little ability to track and curtail their customers who are sharing account information, according to Jeff Cusson, senior vice president for corporate affairs at HBO. And, he said, the network doesn’t view the sharing “as a pervasive problem at this time.”