Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown was a success. And that led to Disney+’s password-sharing crackdown. So, of course, now Max has to bring a password-sharing crackdown of its own to the table. And yep, rest assured, Max’s password-sharing crackdown is coming, but it will start with “some very early, gentle messaging” (keywords here being “start with.”) Here’s what we know about Max’s password-sharing crackdown, which is set to begin in December.
JB Perrette, the president and CEO of global streaming and games at Warner Bros. Discovery, recently had this to say about Max’s password-sharing crackdown endeavors. He noted, per Variety, that Max “some very early, gentle messaging” would come from the streamer in December as it began its effort to dissuade account sharing.
Perrette continues, speaking about how to balance who should be penalized in a Max password-sharing crackdown, “This is an art and a science of trying to figure out who is actually sharing versus who may be actually at their vacation home or on a business trip, and so it’s an art and a science. We will offer a way to essentially add a member, starting in the first quarter. We will then start gradually as we get the data and start figuring out, with some explicit and implicit signals, how good we are at detecting. And then as we go through ’25, you’re going to see the filters get tighter and tighter.”
Tighter and tighter, you say… That doesn’t sound ominous at all. In addition to all the fun Max password-sharing restrictions to come, Perrette said those other two little words every streaming user loves to hear “price increases.” Perette noted price increases for Max would arrive sometime in the future but didn’t note when they would arrive or how much the price increases would be. Instead, he noted, “Obviously, we continue to be a driver of price. Naturally, with Max and with HBO as a content category and a brand, we want to be at the premium end of the pricing. And so we want to continue to push price as we go as well.”
Is that what we want?
