Dodgy boxes and password sharing shrink Netflix and Disney customer base in Ireland

A new survey claims the number of people paying for services has fallen in Ireland, hitting streamers’ bottom line

Password sharing, dodgy boxes and price sensitivity have caused hundreds of thousands of people to quit paying for online video streaming services, according to a new nationwide survey.

The poll of 1,000 people, conducted by Censuswide on behalf of Pure Telecom, says that while the number of Irish people using video-streaming services has risen to 96pc, the number paying for them has shrunk to 78pc.

This, according to the survey, equates to the annual streaming spend in Ireland falling from €1.3bn to €1.1bn.

Services such as Netflix and Disney Plus have recently introduced new curbs on password sharing, to try to enforce terms that restrict usage of accounts to a single household.

However, the survey claims that 615,000 adults in Ireland are now availing of unpaid password sharing, using someone else’s account to stream content without paying for it. Two-thirds of these people are using Netflix and Disney against those services’ streaming rules, the survey claims.

As a result, the average Irish adult now pays for 1.5 streaming services, down from 2.4 services last year, ­according to the research.

Pure Telecom’s survey found 37pc of adults have cancelled one or more video-streaming subscriptions in the last 12 months.

Of those who did, 45pc said they did so because of costs and 28pc said the content was not good enough.

One in five cancelled in favour of another service and the same proportion said they cancelled because the free or discounted period had elapsed.

“Our expectation for this research was that we would find, yet again, that the streaming spend in Ireland had risen,” Pure Telecom CEO Paul Connell said.

“Instead, we found that as we approach 100pc of the population using streaming services, people are getting more frugal about which services, and how many, they are willing to pay for.”

However, the fall in people paying for streaming services is happening as usage of “dodgy boxes”, devices which access movies, TV and sport illegally for free, appear to have hit a high in Ireland.

According to a national Ireland Thinks poll this year for the Sunday Independent, the number of illegal streaming devices in households has doubled to almost 400,000 over the last five years.

Up to 22pc of Irish households now use one of the connected boxes, which are sometimes activated through ­legitimate gadgets such as an Amazon Fire Stick.

Under Irish law, using a dodgy box at home is an offence that can be punished with a fine and a criminal prosecution.

However, while copyright organisations and gardaí have focused their attention on the sellers of dodgy boxes and illegal streams, authorities say there is no current plan to go after individual users. It appears this will even be the case when users’ details are obtained through seizure of equipment from illegal sellers. This contrasts with the UK, where authorities sometimes call to private homes to warn users about their dodgy-box usage.

Last week, a man from Derry was jailed for two years in Omagh Crown Court for supplying illegal subscriptions to streaming services.

Reporting on:independent.ie