Sharing Netflix with Your Friend? You may soon find some surprise in near future.

Most of us share passwords of Hotstar, Netflix, Amazon Prime and other OTT Platforms with our friends and family members. This has been running for years without any issues. But this is soon going to change as the conglomerate of the OTT and cable TV platforms are going to make your life difficult going forward if you are sharing password with any of your friend.

A coalition that includes Netflix Inc., HBO and cable-industry titans is stepping up efforts to crack down on password sharing, discussing new measures to close a loophole that could be costing companies billions of dollars in lost revenue each year. Programmers and cable-TV distributors are considering an array of tactics to cut off people who borrow credentials from friends and relatives to access programming without paying for it. The possible measures include requiring customers to change their passwords periodically or texting codes to subscribers’ phones that they would need to enter to keep watching, according to people familiar with the matter.

But taking more aggressive measures poses risks. The people using services for free especially younger consumers may never agree to sign up for a subscription. That means companies would mostly just be alienating paying customers, who could get frustrated and stop using an app or cancel their service. In other words, there’s plenty of downside and possibly little upside.

Also these services at times intentionally allow users to have it from their friends so that they can use the service and based on the viral content they may go for the service themselves by applying for the service themselves. Also another threat that may possibly come is if these service providers insist on these high rates and reduce the sharing of the content then that may prompt people go for illegal ways of getting the content over internet. 

Many P2P service providers may thrive and the illegal content may thrive over the internet in case these companies become very strict on this. Hence there is a very thing line which has to be taken into account before any decision has been taken by the OTT platform companies.