Study: 40% of Americans Share Streaming Passwords, but Is Netflix Total Actually Possible?
Password sharing in the Streaming Age was always inevitable — especially since many services actively promoted the fact that people who didn’t live in the same house could share a subscription. However, as streaming services are now seeing their subscriber totals plateau and their revenue stagnate or decline, many streamers are starting to reevaluate their philosophy on password sharing. A report from Reviews.org released on Tuesday indicates that 40% of Americans share passwords to streaming services however, most services want to discourage this behavior.
Netflix has recently begun rolling out new protocols to curb password sharing around the world, with plans to begin implementing those practices in the United States in the coming months. Currently, in international markets, the world’s largest streamer is requiring users to select a “primary location” as the home for each subscription, with strict controls over how and when the account can be used elsewhere.
This is something that they have been discussing for some time as the service has been testing password-sharing measures for over two years. The service maintains that worldwide, there are 100 million people using accounts that are paid for by someone who does not live in their household.
The study indicated that there are three top groups that people share their streaming passwords. Running neck-and-neck were friends at 27.4% and parents at 26.71% — more than likely the parents are the ones paying in this situation. In third place are romantic partners that the respondents do not live coming in at 18.23%.
However, Netflix is not the only streaming service dealing with this type of shared usage. The Reviews.org study found that “Over 85% of Americans share their password to Netflix with other people,” but that seems difficult to believe. While the report is vague on the exact meaning of this finding, and its methodology doesn’t clear it up much, there are two potential readings of this data point.
As of the end of 2022, the service reported having 74.3 million subscribers in the United States and Canada combined — the streamer does not break down its totals by country, so we will have to extrapolate the survey results across both countries. When factoring for the average household size in the U.S. and Canada, that comes out to approximately 223 million people with legitimate access to Netflix.
If 85% of Netflix customers in the two countries shared their passwords with someone in another household, another 189.55 million would have access for a total of 412.55M, even though the combined population of the United States and Canada is roughly 370.15 million. So that reading of the data seems unlikely.
The other possibility is that the 85% of people who share a password breaks down to 42.5% who are paying and 42.5% who are watching for free. However, 42.5% of the 223 million legitimate subscribers is still an extra 94.78 million people with access for a total of 317.78m people in the U.S. and Canada. Considering Netflix’s own estimate of 100 million people globally who use the subscription of someone they don’t live with, having nearly 95 million of them being in two countries seems hard to believe.
With that in mind, Reviews.org’s survey also found that 51% of respondents shared their Hulu password, while Prime Video was next at 44%, followed by HBO Max at 36%, and Peacock at 26%. According to the study, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ are both below 25% in terms of password sharing
Given these percentages, it’s easy to see that many people will be affected by increased password crackdowns at Netflix and across the entire streaming landscape. In the same study, over 43% of participants said that Netflix was the one service that they couldn’t go without. So only time will tell what effect the crackdown will have on subscriptions.
Netflix
Netflix is a subscription video streaming service that includes on-demand access to 3,000+ movies, 2,000+ TV Shows, and Netflix Originals like Stranger Things, Squid Game, The Crown, Tiger King, and Bridgerton. They are constantly adding new shows and movies. Some of their Academy Award-winning exclusives include Roma, Marriage Story, Mank, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.