Streaming services lose £340m+ a year due to UK password sharing

One in 10 savvy Brits. or 4.68m of the population have confessed that they secretly pinch a friend’s or relative’s streaming service (e.g. Netflix, Spotify), resulting in potential savings of over £880 a year according to new research.

Commissioned by cybersecurity experts F-Secure the data reveals 874,000 people are secretly using someone else’s Netflix login alone – making it the hardest hit of all services and costing the media giant £104m a year. A further 680,000 people are nabbing someone else’s Amazon Prime, meaning the British public are costing Jeff Bezos £64.6m – not that the billionaire would notice.

How much could freeloading Brits be saving per month/year by pinching others’ subscription details?

With the cheapest Netflix subscription costing £5.99 per month, the 874,000 Brits stealing others’ credentials are saving over £72 a year by freeloading off of the streaming giant, with a further annual saving of £95 a year being made by the 680,000 freeloading off of someone else’s Amazon Prime account (which costs £7.99 a month).  

On top of this:

• 561,000 stingy Brits are using stolen Spotify logins, saving them £9.99 a month  / 119.88 a year, costing the company £67m.
• The same amount, 516,000, are using stolen Disney+ logins, saving them £5.99 a month / £71.88 a year, costing the company £37m.
• 468,000 are using stolen NowTV logins, saving them £12.99 a month / £155.88 a year costing the company £73m.

The study also identified that no streaming service is safe, with thousands of Brits pinching logins of Apple TV, Audible, PS Now, Apple Music, Hayu and Xbox GamePass. If an individual was to steal logins across all of these services they could save over £880 a year. This pesky pilfering is costing the streaming industry a ridiculous £343.49m a year.

Ex-Flix and chill?

While streaming services are most commonly shared among friends and family, we were shocked to identify that 258,120 naughty Brits are also freeloading off of their ex-partner’s login details – or have their partner freeloading off of theirs. The service most affected is Hayu, which streams the likes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Real Housewives. 44,800 Brits are using their ex’s login to watch trash telly on Hayu which is almost double the amount doing so with any other streaming service.

The second most badly hit service is PS Now, which sees 28,080 jilted gamers stealing their ex’s login to play their sadness away.

Tom Gaffney, Principal Consultant for F-Secure’s Consumer Security division said, “There’s a good chance the majority of us have lent or borrowed a username and password for an online service at some point, without giving it much thought. However, this means there is a higher probability of those passwords being compromised and exposed to cybercrime.

“Users should ensure that they’re limiting the spread of their passwords; using two-factor authentication wherever possible; and make each password strong and unique to ensure that access to one account doesn’t also mean access to several others. We know that creating and managing multiple strong and unique passwords is tricky, which is why we’ve launched our Identity Protection product, to help users stay safe online while removing the hassle of juggling several passwords at once.”