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.
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