- Disney CEO Bog Iger says the company will be looking at subscriber agreements for Disney+ later this year.
- The company is targeting “address account” sharing in particular.
- It could see an additional fee come into play for password sharing, which Netflix has recently done.
The halcyon days of sharing passwords for access to streaming platforms are slowly fading away. This year already we have seen Netflix crack down on password sharing, charging subscribers an additional fee if they wish to do so, and soon Disney+ could do the same.
This as Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company is “actively exploring ways to address account sharing,” per The Verge.
Iger made the statement during an earnings call this week, as Disney shared its Q3 2023 results.
While no definitive date has been outlined for the crack down, Iger did highlight that a plan is brewing for later this year. To that end he said Disney+, “Will begin to update our subscriber agreements with additional terms and our sharing policies.”
This he added, would form part of an objective to, “roll out tactics to drive monetization,” during the course of 2024.
As we know from the recent Q3 results, Disney+ Hotstar has lost as many as 12 million subscribers compared to last year, with the majority of said losses being on the divisive Hotstar version of the app, which is the only option available in South Africa and other regions Disney deems to be mobile data-sensitive countries.
During the aforementioned call, Iger did not mention the precise number of accounts where passwords are being shared, but he did say that it was a significant figure. Much like Netflix then, it looks like Disney+ wants to ensure its subscriber growth tracks upwards again, regardless of whether it stokes the ire of existing customers.
Either way, it looks like password sharing will be the main focus for Disney+ in the coming months and into 2024.
“While it is likely you’ll see some impact in calendar 24, it’s possible that… the work will not be completed within the calendar year. But we certainly have established this as a real priority, and we actually think that there’s an opportunity here to help us grow our business,” noted Iger.
Once its plan comes to fruition, it will be interesting to see whether more streaming platforms adopt this tactic, especially as the pressure to keep growth on an upward trajectory persists.
