Max will start cracking down on password sharers next week

After months of dropping hints about a password-sharing crackdown, Max will begin “messaging” suspected streaming freeloaders starting next week. 

“We will kick off literally in about a week,” Warner Bros. Discovery streaming exec JB Perrette said during a Wells Fargo tech and media conference on Tuesday, as The Wrap reports. 

Max’s initial password-sharing crackdown will be more akin to a warning, with some “early, gentle messaging” to streamers “who we think are definitely in the higher tier of usage.” That appears to be the extent of Max’s account-sharing crackdown for now. But sometime early next year, the streamer will roll out “a way to essentially add a member,” Perrette said. 

Meanwhile, Max will start to make its filters “tighter and tighter” once the streamer determines “how good we are at detecting” password sharers, the WB exec continued.  Max hasn’t yet detailed how it will allow account holders to buy additional slots for friends, family, or other non-household streamers, but it will almost certainly follow the lead of Netflix and Disney+, which both let its users pay for sub accounts. 

Disney+ launched its password-sharing crackdown earlier this year. By September, it had revealed how much it would charge for an “extra member”: $6.99 a month for Disney+ Basic (or with-ads) users or $9.99 a month for Disney+ Premium subscribers. 

Netflix, which led the way last year with its own password-sharing crackdown, charges $7.99 a month for each extra user on an account. The reason the streaming industry is following Netflix’s password-sharing playbook is simple: It’s working. 

During its latest quarterly earnings report, Netflix said it had a whopping 282.7 million global subscribers, up roughly five million from the previous quarter, while raking in $9.83 billion in revenue with a healthy 30 percent operating margin.  

That’s quite a turnaround from the dark days of 2022, when Netflix was bleeding subscribers—and once that happened, Netflix dropped its old look-the-other-way attitude toward password sharing. What’s the bottom line of those of us in our living rooms? Password-sharing crackdowns are here to stay.