This week, Disney+ began to roll out new preventative measures against password and account sharing. The supersized streaming service teased these changes earlier in the year, but will now officially implement them in an effort to decrease the number of subscribers who are providing passwords to their accounts to unpaid users.
At Disney’s earnings call on February 7th of this year, CFO Hugh Johnston announced several initiatives to crack down on password and account sharing, including giving subscribers the option of providing access to their accounts to individuals outside their households for an additional fee. Although still in its early stages, this paid sharing program includes a couple of options: users can add an “extra member” to their account at $6.99 per month for Disney+ Basic, or $9.99 for Disney+ Premium. Both are discounted alternatives to the regular subscription fee, but only one “extra member” can be added per account.
Disney+ is hardly the first streaming giant to introduce password-sharing restrictions. In 2023, Netflix began to introduce a similar program, offering an extra fee on top of an account holder’s pre-existing subscription in order to share the account with individuals outside the household. Max is also expected to follow suit sometime this year.
Will Subscribers Jump Ship Due to New Restrictions?
When Netflix first announced their anti-password sharing plan, the majority of their user base was not impressed. Netflix co-CEO even stated that the streaming service expected to lose subscribers, but added that the initial loss would be compensated as most subscribers would choose to keep their accounts, with the added benefit of new subscribers due to the password sharing preventatives. And, sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Netflix reported 5.9 million new subscribers since the implementation of their anti-password sharing plan, with limited account cancelations.
However, with nearly all the major streaming services beginning to roll out password sharing restrictions, it’s possible that some users will decide to give up on streaming entirely. In the early days of Netflix, with Blockbuster being the only other viable option for movies on demand, streaming almost seemed like a miracle — all the entertainment you could ever want, all for a reasonable and rarely adjusted fee! But in the decade-and-a-half since then, streaming services have become a bit like an invasive species: there’s way more than we know what to do with, and they just keep multiplying.
Of course, many households may decide to pay the extra account-sharing fee and keep the convenience of on-demand movies and television shows. But this isn’t the first unpopular decision that streaming services have made — Netflix’s decision to implement a “basic” subscription option which included ads and lower resolution for a cheaper price received instantaneous backlash among users in 2022. With so many price hikes and stipulations, all for a service that provides maybe a third of the movies and television shows it used to, streaming service subscribers may finally decide that enough is enough.