Walt Disney has already laid down the groundwork to start cracking down on password sharing, but it won’t start alerting subscribers until the summer.
That’s according to Disney Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston, who disclosed on a Wednesday earnings call that the effort would kick off in the coming months. He said that the company would alert customers caught sharing their passwords and would give them the opportunity to add that person to the account for a fee.
The techniques described by Johnston indicates that Disney is following Netflix’s playbook when it comes to account sharing. Netflix likewise began shutting down access to users not normally in the same household as the account holder, and offered the option to add a new member for a fee. The result was a new source of customer growth over the last year as it more broadly rolled out the policy. The company said it still has more room to grow and hasn’t reached everyone yet.
Disney likely saw the success Netflix had and wants to get in on that action. The question is whether customers will be loyal enough to Disney+, which saw the service remove content and jack up prices last year. The company reported in its fiscal first-quarter results that the number of global Disney+ customers fell by 1.3 million from the prior period.
Johnston also floated the idea of an additional fee to charge additional people to access its services outside the home, but didn’t provide more details. He said that would come later in the year after the first wave of notifications in the summer.
Disney essentially telegraphed this move after it changed its customer terms of service for both Disney+ and Hulu to open the door to the company analyzing your account. The inclusion of ominous terms like having the right to “terminate” your account at its “sole discretion” should have already had people’s expectations fully set.