According to Deadline, in an effort to boost quarterly earnings, HBO Max will begin to aggressively message their consumers about not sharing passwords with others. During a call with shareholders, JB Perrette, the streaming and gaming chief of Warner Bros. Discovery, announced that the company aims to completely close the password-sharing loophole by the end of the year. Perrette went on to mention that they have tested a method to determine who is a legitimate user and who isn’t, yet didn’t go into details about what exactly that method entailed. He claims that after they have determined if illegitimate users are detected, that’s when the aggressive messaging will be engaged.
Per Newsweek, Netflix initially embraced password sharing. In Tweet from 2017, their official account even curated a post that said, “Love is sharing a password.” The policy change seems to have led many to feel like they engaged in what seems like a bait-and-switch tactic, changing the rules after they gained subscribers from a completely opposite stance. In a reply to @DiscussingFilm’s post about the upcoming HBO Max aggressive messaging, @TylerDuran21 commented, “I miss these times,” with a capture of @netflix’s original post saying, “Love is sharing a password.” Other streaming services followed the lead after Netflix initially announced it intended to crack down on password sharing. It remains to be seen that if love is sharing a password; what exactly is aggressively cracking down on password sharing?
Deadline reported that Perrette went on the record about the current status of password sharing. “The message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancel-able message.” Although he claims it 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.” To answer the real question shareholders were interested in, he says, “the real benefit will start probably in the fourth quarter and then kick in in 2026.”