Netflix co-founder on a potential password sharing crackdown: ‘You’re not scared, are you?’
“You’re not scared, are you?” Netflix Co-Founder & First Netflix CEO Marc Randolph told Yahoo Finance’s YFi PM, later adding: “You know there’s abuse and that’s not fair.”
Several measures are being considered to try to stop this from happening, including “requiring customers to change their passwords periodically or texting codes to subscribers’ phones that they would need to enter to keep watching,” according to Bloomberg. And if those tactics don’t work, Bloomberg noted, subscription services may turn to using thumbprints for logging in.
“I don’t think we’re talking about people coming into your apartment and putting you up against the wall and saying: ‘Show us your credentials,’” Randolph said.
Randolph explained that from Netflix’s inception, it was meant to be flexible and easily accessible.
“There’s abuse and that’s not fair,” he said. “But the whole time you want to make it easy for people to be flexible.”
‘I pay for all of my accounts’
Getting new subscribers hasn’t been an issue for Netflix. In its third-quarter earnings report last month, the company disclosed there were 6.8 million new subscribers. Netflix is expecting a total of 7.6 million global subscribers for the final quarter of the year.
For users who aren’t sharing their passwords on streaming services en masse, Randolph stressed that they should not be penalized by companies implementing new policies trying to prevent it.
“You know we travel, we have family who’s living in different places and so the problem — the very beginning was like this, you don’t want to put in place barriers that impede people who are trying to do the right thing,” he said. “Again, I don’t know what the policy is specifically, but I’m not worried. Well, I pay for all of my accounts.”