- Expect “some very early, gentle messaging” in the coming weeks
- Don’t call it a crackdown, but it’s a crackdown
- More active streamers will be targeted first
Have you seen one of the best horror movies It Follows? It’s about a terrible, frightening thing that follows you and from which there’s no escape. And that’s a bit like password crackdowns on streaming services: you can move from streamer to streamer, but sooner or later the password crackdown will catch up with you. The latest is the Max password sharing crackdown and it’s starting soon.
As Deadline reports, Max is going to target higher data users first with “gentle messaging” encouraging them to stop sharing their logins and add an additional account instead. Those reminders are set to start showing up as soon as next week. But that messaging is going to become less friendly as time goes on in 2025.
How will the Max password crackdown happen?
The crackdown will arrive rather like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: “gradually and then suddenly.”
According to JB Perrette, Warner Bros Discovery’s CEO and President of Global Streaming and Games: “We’ll start some early messaging with some people who we think are in the higher tier of usage. We will offer a way to essentially add a member, starting in the first quarter.”
Once that process is in place, Max will become stricter. “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,” Perrette says. “And then as we go through ’25, you’re going to see the filters get tighter and tighter.”
The news isn’t exactly a surprise: ever since Netflix first mooted its password crackdown it’s been a question of when, not if, rivals would follow suit. Max is just doing what Netflix, Disney Plus and Hulu are doing.