What you need to know
- Max is preparing to begin its password-sharing crackdown for users "next week" for those with a stronger history of sharing.
- Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president of global and streaming, JB Perrette states its crackdown will get more restrictive in 2025.
- We've been expecting this since March as Max views this change as a potential positive boost for its "growth" for subscribers and revenue.
Streaming service Max has detailed what users can expect as 2024 winds down in terms of password sharing.
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) CEO and president of global and streaming, JB Perrette states Max subscribers can expect its password-sharing crackdown to begin shortly, per Deadline (via Android Police). According to Perrette, things are set to kick off "next week." They add that these early stages are looked at as an "art and a science to try and tighten the filter of who’s in there."
The publication states that during the conference at the Wells Fargo TMT Summit, WBD made it clear that it would begin notifying users that it feels have been more prone to sharing their password with those outside the household. These initial messages are intended to be "gentle," though it wasn't explained how they will appear. These will likely be simple pop-up messages when opening the app, but we'll have to wait and see.
Next week will also begin Max's data collecting period about how well it's detecting and notifying those who're sharing credentials.
Perrette states, "we will then start gradually as we get the data and start figuring out, with some explicit and implicit signals, how good we are at detecting. And then as we go through ’25, you’re going to see the filters get tighter and tighter."
Additionally, the company plans to incorporate a Netflix-style way to add a "member" to your account.
A separate report by TheWrap sees WBD's Perrette expand on the financial side of this venture. The service reportedly does not want to "oversell the scale" of its crackdown and its (potential) effect on its "margin for growth." However, Perrette states that Max could see "meaningful" growth in terms of subs and revenue.
We've been expecting Max to begin cracking down on password sharing since Perrette alluded to it in March. Similar to what's been said today, Max stressed the potential positive side effects of deploying such a method against sharing. It was stated that the company saw it as a "meaningful opportunity" relative to its "scale of business."
Max saw what Netflix did — though it was controversial — and highlighted it as being "extremely successful."
The streaming platform's revenue report for Q4 2023 saw a drastic decline in profits as it reported a total loss of $55 million. Despite the sour note, it was a turnaround from its previous $217 million loss a year before that. It wasn't stated earlier this year if Max would pursue a way for users to add more members like Netflix, but with confirmation arriving today (Dec 3), it seems there are plans to try and stem the financial bleeding.
It's also worth mentioning that Max (at the time) was considering "ad format enhancements." The service was reportedly thinking about introducing shoppable ads, which is something YouTube's done with Shorts.
