If you’ve been sharing account access to HBO Max, the good times are soon coming to an end.
JB Perrette, head of streaming and gaming at Warner Bros. Discovery said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that messaging to consumers is about to get more “aggressive.” The media company looking to close the loopholes by the end of 2025, with the impact starting to appear in its financials by 2026.
Following in Netflix’s lead, WBD, Disney and other media companies are all ramping up efforts to limit password sharing, anticipating a significant financial payoff from cracking down on once-overlooked practice.
Several months of testing has enabled WBD to determine “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user,” Perrette said. Once that is determined, he continued, the next step is to “turn on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen” in order to and make sure that “we are putting the net in the right place, so to speak.”
Asked about what “inning” the process is in, to use the baseball cliché, Perrette said only the first. By the fourth quarter, he said, the process will be happening “in a much more aggressive fashion.”
“The message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancel-able message,” he said. It will “start to get more fixed and such that people have to take action as opposed to right now, sort of having to be a voluntary process.” Once those directives are established, he said, “the real benefit will start probably in the fourth quarter and then kick in in 2026.”
