All borrowers are not equal, so how should you treat them.

There is a balance to strike when dealing with sharers and borrowers among your subscribers. We have a lot to learn from Netflix’s approach to dealing with this where they have been intentional with their actions and always started with a small community of their most engaged base (to reduce the impact of churn) and incrementally introducing friction for stubborn borrowers who did not convert. Even with numerous trials, Netflix did have some early churn but having stayed the course, they are seeing the increase in revenue from the move into “paid sharing”.

We discuss some of the options for dealing with password sharing in your base and the pros and cons for each of them.

1. Password Reset

This is usually the best way to deal with accidental sharing as well as any malicious breach of subscriber credentials. Within password reset, there are many ways to approach this type of sharers.

Option 1 - Subscriber-Controlled Password Reset

Send the sharers an email about “suspicious activity” and multiple households using their password. Within this email, include a CTA (call-to-action) that takes them to their account where a password reset option is available in addition to managing and removing suspicious devices.

Option 2 - Hard Password Reset

Do a hard password reset for all devices on the sharer account devices. It is important to ensure that this reset is not done just before a major TV event because it would introduce a lot of friction too early in the journey.

Let’s look at the Pros and Cons of these approaches.

If, even after a password reset, the same households are still sharing their credentials, it may be time to look at options that address benevolent and situational sharing.

2. Adding a New Member Subscription

One of the main positives in the way that Netflix addressed their sharing problem was they spent time understanding the motivations that lead to sharing. They used it as an opportunity to increase their membership options to allow parents to share credentials with their children or allow some members to share their credentials with family or friends.

There are a few different options to convert borrowers to paid sharing.

Option 1 – Sharing Package

Purchase a subscription at a discounted price for the borrowers. In this option, the borrowers stay on the sharer's account and the sharer can pay for this “paid sharing”. This allows for the sharer to continue paying for the borrowers (and reduce the billing setup for the borrower). This can also be called Paid Sharing.

Option 2 – Add a Member

Purchase a subscription at a discounted price for the borrowers. However, the borrowers still need to create their own account to use this “reduced” fee. This now creates a direct customer relationship with the operator creating opportunities for upselling to their own package away from the sharer later. Also here, the borrower gets their own profile to use which is valuable for Recommendations and to Continue Watching.

Option 3: Add a Home

This is a variation of Option 2 for sharers who have more than 1 home and this allows them to use their subscription across multiple households. This option does not offer the benefit of a different profile because of the assumption that the same household is using the service from multiple locations. This is particularly useful to have in locations where multiple households are more typical. When restrictive options like concurrency restrictions are applied to sharers, this is the option that gives them the best UX.

Here's the Pros and Cons list for these approaches.

Across all 3 options, Synamedia’s CSFEye can help track conversions and likely increases in ARPU and/or MAU because of running these as separate campaigns.

3. Migrating them to Ad-Funded Offering

For highly engaged sharers/borrowers with a higher-than-average daily viewing duration, migrating these households to an ad-funded offering instead of moving them to the additional package will generate higher ARPU overall. This action is only relevant to customers who already have an AVOD offering available. Converting password-sharers to ad-funded offerings is not an adequate factor to create this type of offering from scratch.

This is particularly relevant in price-sensitive markets or segments where initiatives like adding an extra member might not see much traction. Early Netflix trials in USCAN have shown promising results for them on ARPU increase and this also creates a stronger ad-funded base for your AVOD offering.

Option 1

Allow sharers to choose main HH/main HH profiles to keep on the standard Tier and migrate others to ad-funded offerings.

Option 2

Migrate all sharers (and therefore borrowers) to the ad-funded offering.

4. Concurrency restriction

A common option to restrict the amount of sharing of your service is to apply limits to the number of devices a household may use in total and to restrict the concurrency of how many streams are allowed at any one time. However, there is a tension between applying limits to restrict sharing and frustrating users who use the service within a larger household with many people and devices.

Some of the options available to apply restrictions:

Option 1 - Limit All Accounts

Apply device limits and concurrency restrictions across all accounts, optionally increasing limits with higher subscription tiers.

Option 2 - Limit Sharing Accounts

Apply stricter device and concurrency restrictions to only sharer accounts instead of the entire base.