Getting Newsticker.el to use rss feeds with credentials

I am trying to use Newsticker.el also on some internal rss feeds that require login credentials. Since everything newsticker does is get wget to receive feeds, I could just define the username and password in the wget configuration part of newsticker.el

So, I configured the following in my init.el

'(newsticker-url-list (quote (("RSS FEED" "https://to.feed.com/timeline?format=rss"
              nil nil ("--user=<username>" "--password=<password>" "-q" "-O" "-")))

Filing options --userand --passworddirectly wget works well, but it is not included in the tune newsticker.el. Has anyone tried something like this before?