MUMBAI: Indian streaming service subscribers lead the world in lending their accounts to others who don’t have one, says a report by market research firm Ampere Analysis. Next in line are OTT subs in Netherlands and France with the Japanese expectedly being the country where the least number of users borrow OTT accounts. The UK, China and Indonesia are nations where account borrowing is growing the fastest.

That’s good news and it’s bad news too. It clearly shows how much in demand, the content on streaming services is; it’s bad especially for SVOD platforms as they are losing subscription revenue on account of this tendency.

Ampere estimates there are 70 million households in 22 countries who are borrowing one or more accounts. It also stated that the trend has picked up in the past 12 months, with the growth in popularity of existing services and the launch of new services from eight per cent of global internet users in Q1 2019  to 11 per cent in Q1 2020.

The market research firm expects this tendency to increase with the proliferation of OTT services worldwide.

Ampere further highlighted in the report that  SVOD service providers should see the glass half full not half empty as far as the borrowers are concerned. There’s a possibility to convert some of them into subscribers. Reason: almost three-quarters of them representing 50 million subscribe to at least one OTT service and more than two-thirds of them have pay TV at home. Additionally, half of these borrowers acknowledged that they would not mind paying extra for something that gives them exactly what they want.

And guess what, a large subset of borrowers are viewing mainly sports and that too for specific periods during the seasons when their favourite games are aired. 

Netflix has raised concern about shared accounts in the past. In a Q3 2019 financial investor call interview in October 2019, Netflix chief product officer Greg Peters had observed that the streamer was looking at consumer-friendly ways to push back at the edges of password sharing.

Some surveys have revealed that just under 10 per cent  of Netflix subscribers are not paying for their accounts, even as millennials are rampantly  sharing their passwords around. Estimates are that the loss accruing on account of this, to Netflix, would be in the region of $150 million every month.

That is not something anyone can sniff at.