Max to offer paid-sharing in password-sharing crackdown
Warner Bros. Discovery will reportedly implement paid-sharing on Max as it gets stricter this year about subscribers letting other people use their accounts.
Warner Bros. Discovery will reportedly implement paid-sharing on Max as it gets stricter later this year about subscribers letting other people use their accounts.
Bloomberg reported this week that Warner Bros. Discovery will roll out an option for members to pay for "extra members" streaming with their Max subscriptions to have their own username and password as part of its upcoming effort to curb account-sharing. The outlet cited people "familiar with the company’s plan."
If implemented, that would seemingly resemble what Netflix, the pioneer of cracking down on password-sharing among major streaming platforms, did in 2023.
At the time, Netflix began offering "extra member lots" to subscribers who wished to share their account with people outside their household for an additional $7.99 each.
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The cost of the "extra members" on Max’s platform will be cheaper than $9.99, according to Bloomberg.
Max currently charges that much in the U.S. for its ad-supported tier. Its two other subscription options, Ad-Free and Ultimate Ad-Free, cost $15.99 and $19.99 per month, respectively, per the platform’s website.
The report comes after Global Streaming and Games CEO Jean-Briac Perrette indicated last month at a Morgan Stanley-hosted conference that Max would take action against password-sharing.
He said at the time that Max was "going to be doing that starting later this year and into ‘25, which is another growth opportunity for us."
At the end of 2023, subscribers to Warner Bros. Discovery’s direct-to-consumer platforms, which include HBO, Max and Discovery+, totaled 97.7 million.
WARNER BROS DISCOVERY'S MAX HAS PASSWORD-SHARING CRACKDOWN IN PIPELINE
He also said in March that Warner Bros. Discovery considered curbing password-sharing as a "meaningful opportunity" for the company "relative to the scale of our business."
"I’m conscious of not overselling it because you see Netflix’s success, but Netflix was in the market for 17 years. That means people are sharing passwords for 17 years," he said. "We’ve been in the market for four, if you count the HBO Max launch."
When Netflix started rolling out its account-sharing limits, it posted paying subscriber and revenue gains. Its global membership count stood at 269.6 million as of the first quarter.
Warner Bros. Discovery has been looking to increase the profitability of its streaming segment through various initiatives.
The company reportedly isn’t the only one to draw inspiration from Netflix’s password-sharing restrictions. Disney has similar plans of its own for Disney+ that viewers will start to see appear on the streaming platform this year.
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Max made its official debut last year. The platform, which originally brought together both HBO Max and Discovery+ content, is available in a slew of countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in addition to the U.S., with more expansion elsewhere expected this year.