On an earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced price increases for Disney+ and Hulu. The ad-free plans for each service will go up over 25% per month. And that’s not the only measure the company is planning to take to drive profit for Disney+. In news we first saw at IGN, the streamer will follow in Netflix’s footsteps. Disney will start cracking down on password sharing in 2024. Netflix’s own efforts from earlier this year brought the streaming service six million new subscribers, so it’s not a surprise to see Disney+ copying the move.
Iger said on the earnings call, “We are actively exploring ways to address account sharing and the best options for paying subscribers to share their accounts with friends and family. Later this year, we will begin to update our subscriber agreements with additional terms and our sharing policies. And we will roll out tactics to drive monetization sometime in 2024.”
The CEO called it a priority while also stating he doesn’t know that it will meaningfully contribute to growth. To that point, Netflix has been established as a streaming service since 2007. Disney+, however, launched in 2019. The Disney service doesn’t have close to the same number of subscribers as Netflix. It doesn’t have as much to gain. But hey, maybe Disney+ is applying this tactic in order to gain more profit that they will then use to pay striking writers and actors fair residuals. After all, the streaming service wouldn’t exist without the content writers and actors create.
Netflix’s advance against password sharing started with notifications to existing customers. Eventually if a user outside of the household tried to log-in into a shared account, Netflix forced the option of creating a new account. Iger’s comments mentions Disney looking at the best options for paying subscribers to share that accounts, but we have a hunch the best one will be no sharing outside of a household.