Max, another major platform that ruined years of brand recognition with a bizarre name change, is about to get serious about password sharing, according to The Verge. The parent company of Warner Bros. Discovery said during its third-quarter earnings call that it will begin to crack down on the practice over the next few months, as well as “very soft hints” to encourage people to splurge.
CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said that the aforementioned soft messages will be amplified in 2025, indicating a possible mandate. He suggested that people who share passwords should make the subscription cost go up for everyone, as it’s like “asking members who haven’t subscribed or members of multiple households to pay a little more.”
The company also announced nearly ten billion in revenue last quarter, as well as 7.2 million new Max subscribers. This is the largest jump in the number of subscribers in the platform’s history. However, there is still more juice to be squeezed out of this lemon, as some of these 7.2 million people have probably passed the password on to a grandchild or someone else.
Wiedenfels also did not rule out the possibility of another price increase. He said that the “premium nature” of Max gives the platform “enough room to continue to raise the price we have prudently set.” Speaking of prudence, the subscription price went up in June of this year and again in 2023. So now price increases are like annual installments on Madden, or what?
Max is just the latest streamer to put an end to password sharing. Netflix makes people pay for sharing passwords, and Disney+ only started fighting this phenomenon in September.
