Netflix began cracking down on password sharing about two years ago. There were concerns about people who logged into their accounts while traveling or kids who used the family account while in college, but, of course those were only consumer-based worries. Disney+ and all of the other streaming services smelled profits in the water and quickly followed suit. Streaming consumers were about to enter into an extremely annoying, expensive timeline.
HBO Max is the latest service to get in on the action. Apparently, execs feel like they’re only in the first inning (their baseball metaphor, not mine!) in the war against password sharers. But, baseball is one of those slow-burn types of games. As the game heats up, HBO Max is preparing to get more “aggressive” about password sharing.
If you’ve been sharing account access to HBO Max, the good times are soon coming to an end. JB Perrette, head of streaming and gaming at Warner Bros. Discovery said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that messaging to consumers is about to get more “aggressive.” The media company looking to close the loopholes by the end of 2025, with the impact starting to appear in its financials by 2026.
Following in Netflix’s lead, WBD, Disney and other media companies are all ramping up efforts to limit password sharing, anticipating a significant financial payoff from cracking down on once-overlooked practice.
Several months of testing has enabled WBD to determine “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user,” Perrette said. Once that is determined, he continued, the next step is to “turn on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen” in order to and make sure that “we are putting the net in the right place, so to speak.”
Asked about what “inning” the process is in, to use the baseball cliché, Perrette said only the first. By the fourth quarter, he said, the process will be happening “in a much more aggressive fashion.”
“The message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancel-able message,” he said. It will “start to get more fixed and such that people have to take action as opposed to right now, sort of having to be a voluntary process.” Once those directives are established, he said, “the real benefit will start probably in the fourth quarter and then kick in in 2026.”
WBD reported solid results for the quarter, adding 3.4 million streaming subscribers (mostly via international expansion) to reach 125.7 million overall.
How long will it take us to get into the ninth inning? Perhaps HBO Max (HBO? Max?) should get its house in order before they start cracking down content sharing. They just canceled Duster, which was one of their only original program offerings. Since they don’t have a lot of new programming going on right now, many subscribers rely on their back catalog. That’s great and all, but what do they have that’s going to even drive (Duster pun intended) new viewers in? There are so many other options that all of these streamers are going to have to continually come up with new ways to draw people in. Otherwise, they’re going to lose a battle in which services like Roku offer older shows at a much cheaper price.
Photos credit: Avalon.red and via Instagram
Frankly, this “aggressive” talk is going to pi$$ off people and get a lot of people cancelling the streamers. With the CoL going up, wages down, tariffs, holidays coming up…more and more people are going to tighten their belts and decide what they can and can’t live w/out. Gone are going to be the days of having half a doz streamers, some of which offer little new content and mostly rely on back catalogues.
I can see if they can track a dozen or more people on one account login, but FFS, sharing with your college kids or parents who are clueless about streaming? Logging in when traveling? Wouldn’t surprise me if they price themselves out of the market. People are going to get it for the one show they watch, then drop it. Considering most streaming shows are 6-10 episodes a “season”, they may get revenue for 2-2 1/2 mos. and then lose the account.
I dunno, I think I’d rather have a steady year-round pay-in than people paying only 6-10 wks at a time in a revolving door situation, with NO guarantee of coming back (especially with the large gap btwn “seasons”… people lose interest. We’ve become a generation of, “LOOK! SQUIRRELL!!” as something else catches our attention in the long span btwn seasons. I know that’s happened to me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I may miss something for a short time, but, whatevah.
I wait for most of the episodes to drop and then I get Max and watch the show in a week. Eight episodes for Gilded Age and twelve for AJLT. I finish them in less than two weeks. As soon as I sign up, I cancel so I don’t forget and pay an extra month. The only time I keep a streamer is during Black Friday. Last year I got Hulu for 99 cents a month for a year. When I’m not watching anything on certain streaming apps I cancel for a few months. It’s the only way to keep the cost down. Prices keep going up and the commercials are getting more obnoxious!
Same. I promised myself I would never be paying for more than three streamers at a time (two would be better), so clicked to cancel a service after I binged everything on my list, and they offered a very low rate until the end of the year, so they kept me for a few more months. But I’ve already put a reminder in my calendar to cancel in December.
Now that I’ve typed that, it’s probably only a matter of time before streaming services realize customers are coming and going to avoid continuous fees, and they’ll probably change their policies to lock you in to a full year at a time or charge a penalty for cancelling.