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Have you been enjoying sharing your HBO Max account with family members who live in a different state, city, or even just a different house than you? Well tough shit. That’s done. It’s 2025 and if you have even a few pennies left to squeeze out, they will be squeezed out of you. Netflix did it, and most everyone complied, so now HBO Max is gearing up to do the squeezing, and it’s about to get a lot more “aggressive.”
This news comes from today’s Warner Bros. Discovery quarterly earnings call, delivered by the company’s head of streaming and gaming, JB Perrette. Per Deadline, WBD has been spending the last few months conducting tests and determining “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user.” With that apparently completed, it will soon be time to “turn on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen” around password sharing and to make sure “we are putting the net in the right place, so to speak.” Per The Wrap, this last comment means directing the aggression not at people on vacation or work trips but rather, like, college students. Perrette said on the call that “the message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancel-able message,” but that by the fourth quarter of this year, the crackdown will be happening “a much more aggressive fashion,” where the messaging will “start to get more fixed and such that people have to take action as opposed to right now, sort of having to be a voluntary process.”
HBO Max started threatening a crackdown on password sharing back in its rebellious teenage years when it insisted we all call it Max. In April, it unveiled the plan to charge people (at least) $9.99 per month to add an extra profile to an existing account, which is currently the price for a solo subscription with ads. Disney, which just wholly absorbed Hulu into its gelatinous mass, also set about on a password crackdown within the past 12 months.
