The Walt Disney Company is moving forward with a plan to crack down on password sharing between paying members of its Disney Plus streaming service and freeloaders who use another person’s account.
The move is being characterized by the entertainment giant as a rollout of a new paid password-sharing feature that will give certain Disney Plus customers the option to pay an additional fee if they want to continue sharing their account with people who live beyond their immediate household.
The paid sharing feature will allow Disney Plus customers to pay an extra $7 per month to share their account if they subscribe to the ad-supported tier of the service, or an extra $10 per month to share their ad-free Disney Plus account. The charge is in addition to the $10 per month that the ad-supported version of Disney Plus will cost from October 17, and $16 per month that the ad-free version of Disney Plus will cost after that date.
The extra member perk is not available to subscribers of the Disney Duo Bundle, which includes Hulu, or the Disney Trio Bundle, which offers access to Hulu and ESPN Plus.
Disney says it will evaluate the home location of a subscriber based on their active usage of the service. Beyond that, it isn’t clear how Disney will determine whether an account holder is using Disney Plus on their home network or if another person is using it.
Disney will allow customers to continue streaming Disney Plus when they’re traveling by offering them an option to choose “I’m Away From Home” within the paid sharing notification. Customers can also choose an option that allows them to update their primary household. Both will require sending a one-time code to the email address associated with the primary account holder.
For now, the change appears to be limited to Disney Plus — Hulu and ESPN Plus were not mentioned in a note to customers on the paid membership feature, though all three services now use a single, Disney-related sign-on system.
The password-sharing crackdown was not unexpected: During a conference call with investors last month, Disney executives affirmed plans to address freeloaders using their service without paying for a membership.
The move follows similar password-sharing crackdowns by peer services like Netflix, which were initially blamed on higher subscription churn in some regions but have been proven over the long-term to drive additional subscription growth, particularly to cheaper, ad-supported tiers.
Disney counted more than 118 million global subscribers to Disney Plus as of August. In the United States and Canada, the sevice has around 55 million customers.
