Netflix Password Sharing Practice Will Be Stopped By This AI-Powered Tool

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other such channels offer web series in plenty. They are well written, with good characters and most importantly, they are fast, unlike the usual soaps on television.

But you have to pay a certain price to watch these web series, create an account and get a password.

To avoid paying double, what people do is share the details of their account and passwords.

Once someone in a group gets a paid subscription, the password is circulated and everyone gets to watch in a single subscription.

Well, not anymore. If a password is shared, such cases will be hunted down by a new service introduced by a UK company Synamedia.

How does it work?

At this years CES, Synamedia, which is the largest independent video software provider, introduced a new service, Credentials Sharing Insight, that will be able to spot any passwords that have been shared.

1. A streaming service, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, buys access to Synamedia’s platform.
2. This platform then analyses data from all users, which depends on many factors, like the location of the account that has been accessed, what content is being watched, and through which device, etc.
3. It looks for a pattern that might help detect a shared password and it also gives the service provider a probability score (a probable number about how certain the system is of the password being shared).
4. If the platform finds out that the password has definitely been shared with several people, the account might be closed down permanently.
5. If the password is being used within a family, less strict action will be taken, like an email is sent to upgrade the account to premium or so.

“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,” says Jean Marc Racine, CPO and GM EMEA of Synamedia.

Use of AI to detect patterns

The new platform will use artificial intelligence and machine learning and identify, monitor and analyze the pattern of password sharing. Real-time dashboards will display any abnormal activity detected including alerts and trend analysis.

Synamedia Credentials Sharing Insight is available as a cloud or on-premise offering. It is already in trials with some pay-TV operators.