Speaking anecdotally, I cut the cord years ago and do have some shared password access that I use, but purely "because it's there". I got along fine without it and will continue to do so if this crackdown gets me.
The cable companies are just the pipe. Cable company margins on video are low. Content providers control the content production and price.
Unless you're suggesting the solution to the problem is more vertical integration (a la Comcast NBCUniversal)?
"The chief executive officer of Charter Communications Inc., which sells cable TV under the Spectrum name, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing."
Seems to me the cable companies are heavily involved. Which makes sense because they would like to sell the cable TV access just as much as the Internet access. If customers only need streaming and no cable TV then I would imagine they would stand to lose quite a bit of revenue.
>Password sharing is a symptom of cable companies inability (or indifference) to innovate on either content or price
Because video is barely profitable and HSD is very profitable, cable companies definitely do not like to sell TV as much as they like to sell HSD. Cord cutting is not as big a deal for the cable companies' profitability as most people think. If anything, the bandwidth required for streaming (now in HD but soon in 4k and then in VR) is so high DSL becomes less viable as a competitor and cable companies can raise prices for HSD even faster.
For cable/satellite/OTT, most of the package (Viacom, Time Warner, NBCUniversal, etc) content providers bundle content and get a large lump sum up-front per annum from each distributor. However, premium a la carte content providers (HBO, Showtime, etc) receive a small lump sum plus a a bulk of the per subscription fee.
For Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime - content is bundled and paid for up-front per annum on a multi-year contract. For example, Paramount/MGM/Lionsgate/EPIX distributed solely through Netflix thru 2014 and then switched sole distribution to Amazon Prime.
Hollywood traditionally likes cash up front because production and marketing costs are "bursty" rather than evenly distributed. And this is because the success to failure rate (risk) of entertainment products is too abysmal to easily obtain reasonable financing rates from lenders or reasonable terms from investors.