Warner Bros Discovery will soon begin a “soft” crackdown on password sharing between paying customers of its streaming service Max and freeloaders who watch content without a paid subscription, a company executive confirmed this week.
Speaking at an annual tech summit held by Wells Fargo on Friday, WBD CEO of Streaming and Gaming J.B. Perrette said the company will start evaluating consumption habits and other metadata from users of its Max service to determine if the app is being used in a single household — as it is supposed to be — or if customers are sharing their credentials with people who live or stream somewhere else, with the preliminary evaluation period starting next week.
“We’ll start some early messaging with some people who we think are in the higher tier of usage,” Perrette said. “We will offer a way to essentially add a member, starting in the first quarter.”
That perk will resemble features offered by Netflix and the Walt Disney Company’s Disney Plus, which allow customers with active subscriptions to pay a little more per month for the privilege of sharing their password with one person who lives beyond their household. The perk is intended to ensure parents can continue to share their passwords with college students who live in dorms, or that couples can share their passwords even if they live in separate homes, or for any other reason.
WBD will continue scrutinizing consumption and account-related data and evaluate the effects of its gentle crackdown throughout the first half of 2025 before its strategy “really begins to kick in” during the latter half of the year and into 2026.
Globally, WBD has 110.5 million people paying for Max, HBO Max (in some countries) and Discovery Plus. The growth of Max in the United States has slowed over the past few financial quarters, with WBD adding just 200,000 paying customers during the third financial quarter (Q3) of this year, according to earnings data reviewed by The Desk.
That has done little to cut into WBD’s ability to earn from Max, with the entertainment giant bringing in $289 million in profit off revenue of $2.6 billion. Price adjustments and the rollout of Max in more territories were cited as major factors behind WBD’s healthy streaming business.
Max is one of the last services to crack down on password-sharing, which media executives once viewed as a benefit to getting their services in front of more streamers, and an unlikely threat to their growing operations. Comcast’s Peacock, Lionsgate’s Starz and Paramount Plus with Showtime do not explicitly endorse password-sharing between users, but are some of the last services without firm mechanisms in place to curb the practice.
