If you’re still sharing a login to Disney+, Hulu, or ESPN+, you’ve officially been warned. Again. The crackdown “kicks in in earnest in September,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said in the company’s earnings call today — a mere 24 hours after Disney announced new price increases for its streaming services.
If you’ve somehow missed all this up till now, here’s the gist: Streaming services used to mostly look the other way when it came to sharing logins. Netflix even encouraged it at one point. But then these companies finally realized that they needed streaming to, ya know, be profitable. And that meant no more freeloading. So they started implementing some guardrails that basically meant you’d need to pony up some extra money if you didn’t actually live in the same house as the owner of the account.
That understandably caused some consternation for the folks used to getting things for free. And there are legitimate gripes from parents of college-age students, who now have to pay more for a streaming account because their child committed the sin of becoming educated. (Never mind that there often are student discounts on full accounts.)
Netflix was the first to lead the crackdown, either encouraging freeloaders to get their own account, or allowing primary account owners to add on an addition user, for an additional fee. None of that is particularly unreasonable. And it worked — more people subscribed to Netflix because of the crackdown.
And that brings us back to Disney, which had been slowly working its way toward a one-home, one-account future, after giving fair warning in August 2023 and then starting the crackdown a month later.
“By the way,” Iger continued, “we’ve had no backlash at all to the notifications that have gone out and to the work that we’ve already been doing.” That’s maybe a little bit of an exaggeration — certainly someone somewhere complained when they found out they’d actually have to pay for content. But the point is taken. Disney (and the other services) were leaving money on the table in a time when everyone finally started counting all the nickels and dimes.
Which they should have been doing all along.