(Credit: Roku/Warner Bros. Discovery)
The Warner Bros. Discovery-owned streaming service Max now has over 110 million subscribers and will start its expected password-sharing crackdown this year, executives confirmed during a Thursday earnings call.
CEO David Zaslav said the company is trying to squeeze extra revenue from existing products amid "generational disruption." One way to do this is to prevent Max subscribers from sharing account passwords with friends or family in other households, as other streaming services have done.
WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said Max will start that shift in the coming months and will ramp up its password-sharing crackdown throughout 2025 and 2026. So expect some potential changes this holiday season, like "very soft messaging" that asks you to either sign up for a new account or pay more when using someone else's account.
The company sees a password-sharing crackdown as a way to indirectly secure more revenue instead of raising subscription prices. The last price hike happened in June when the ad-free tier increased from $15.99 to $16.99 and the Ultimate Ad-Free plan jumped $1 to $20.99.
Disney+ and Netflix started their own campaigns with email notifications about add-on options and ended with forcing users to verify their accounts when logging on from a different location. A year ago, Netflix hadn't enforced all accounts that appeared to be sharing passwords; 14% were still account-sharing at that point. It's since gotten harder to circumvent, but there are still ways to get around the ban.
Earlier this year, Max rolled out in Latin America and Europe—an expansion that helped add 7.2 million subscribers to its base. It's also planning to launch in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia later this month.