HBO Max will be expanding its policies on password sharing with people outside of your household, by cracking down on password sharing globally. The update was shared during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call earlier today and first reported on by The Wrap.
JB Perrette, head of streaming and games at Warner Bros. Discovery, first announced that the company would implement policies to cut down on password sharing in August 2025. At that time, HBO Max started giving subscribers a pop up message instructing them to create a new account for users outside of their household, with the option to close the message and continue using the service.
“The message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancelable message,” Perrette said, noting that the message will change “such that people have to take action as opposed to right now sort of having to be a voluntary process.” He says that HBO Max will determine “who’s a legitimate user, who may not be a legitimate user,” then give the more “aggressive” message to anyone who isn’t an account owner or in the owner’s household.
Now, those stricter messages and policies will apply to user accounts outside of the U.S. as well. The announcement was made just after the service launched in Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Israel, and Greece in January. HBO Max is set to launch in the UK and Ireland next month.
The company believes cracking down on password sharing will help to grow the subscriber base, though there isn’t data to prove that banning password sharing will promote ongoing growth. It’s more likely that when the policies take effect, the service will see a one-time spike in sign ups before leveling back out.
During today’s earnings call, WBD also said that it will no longer be sharing subscriber numbers for HBO Max, so we may not find out exactly how the new global policies impact those numbers.