Editor-DN
What you need to know.
- Disney, now rolling out its paid sharing crackdown in a big way, is offering an extra member option for paid sharing.
- Disney Plus services are now limited to one household user per account, but subscribers can pay extra to add another user who doesn’t live in their primary residence.
- In the United States, Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, subscribers to the Basic plan can add an additional member for $6.99.
- Premium subscribers pay $9.99, and the Disney Plus bundle (with Hulu and ESPN Plus) doesn’t support adding an additional member.
Disney is preparing users worldwide for a password-sharing crackdown on the Disney Plus streaming service, and now it’s officially underway. In one Blog post Last week, the company outlined its plans to get account sharers to pay their own way for the service. Part of that effort includes making it clear that, like Netflix, Disney Plus is intended to work within a home only.
“Your Disney+ subscription is intended for use within your home, which is the collection of devices connected to your primary personal residence used by the persons living there,” Disney said in the post.
People outside your household will need to sign up and pay for their own subscription to continue enjoying Disney+ or be added as additional members to your account for an additional monthly fee. ”
Several policies are now being introduced by Disney in select markets around the world this summer. Their goal is to increase Disney’s streaming revenue, either by forcing password-sharers to purchase their plan or by forcing account owners to add a paid additional member. Disney’s streaming arm has lost money for years, but turned profitable for the first time during Q3 2024, when a Income report revealed that the company generated $47 million in revenue across Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus.
Disney wants to continue that momentum with new Extra Member plans, available for Disney Plus Basic and Premium tiers. Subscribers can add someone outside their home to their plan for an additional $6.99 for basic plans or $9.99 for premium plans. At this time, you can only add one additional member to a plan, and additional members are not supported for bundles that include Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus.
These options are widely available to subscribers in the US, Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. If users do not wish to add an additional member, they can port the user profile to a new Disney Plus account, as long as it is not a normal account or a junior mode account.
Fortunately, you have travel or relocation options. If you get an alert that Disney Plus detects you’re away from home, you can tap “I’m away from home” or “Update family” to keep watching. It will send a one-time password to the account owner’s email for verification. It’s unclear whether Disney Plus will have any long-term restrictions to prevent password sharing, similar to Netflix’s requirements, which force you to connect to a home Wi-Fi network every month.
How New Password Sharing Policies Hurt Families
Disney and Netflix’s actions in cracking down on password sharing are indicative of how the services industry generally treats family plans. Most subscription services, like Apple iCloud Plus or Google One Premium, give you a set number of accounts with which you can share purchases or benefits. Steam Families, which let you share games and media purchased on Steam, work similarly.
Apple, Google, and Valve let you share content with a set number of accounts, regardless of where they are located. Meanwhile, streaming services are throwing this traditional notion of family sharing out the window. Disney and Netflix call their projects “domestic,” but they’re really for real estate or residences. Families and households take different forms, and members do not always live in the same place.
Netflix and Disney don’t care. In fact, they would prefer if multiple family members had to pay for their services. They have reached their peak income and want more. If most families already have a Netflix or Disney Plus subscription, how do these companies continue to thrive? The answer is: try to break up those families.
Take me, for example. I live in Arizona, and the rest of my family lives on the east coast of the US. Most of my family is often together, but I have some siblings in college. I was not in school long. It seems crazy for myself (especially since I was still a full-time student), my siblings, and my parents to all have separate subscriptions. This is just my immediate family I’m talking about.
But that’s exactly what Disney and Netflix want. As a consumer, my first response to these policies is simple: Who are Disney and Netflix to tell me where and how I can use the subscription I’m paying for? Especially when prices keep increasing year after year.
This is making me, and many others, ditch streamers altogether. The only streaming service I subscribe to is Paramount Plus. I love it, but I’ve been completely disenfranchised by others. In a way, Disney and Netflix’s crackdown has worked. I no longer share accounts with their services, but I no longer use them at all.
These moves only do one thing: push people back into piracy
The elephant in the room here is piracy. Yes, piracy is illegal, and you really shouldn’t be doing it. But piracy was booming in the 1990s and early 2000s before digital music stores like iTunes came along. Sites like Napster were ubiquitous for sharing pirated content. Piracy was at a standstill when it was easy to buy media, either through individual online purchases or through all-inclusive subscriptions.
While it’s easy to legally pay for media, consumers have proven over the decades that they’ll definitely do it. However, the market has also learned the hard way that when companies and studios make it difficult to obtain licenses and legally stream content, consumers will pirate content outright.
As we enter the final phase of the streaming wars, where account sharing is illegal, digital rights battles remove content from services on a monthly basis, and prices increase on an annual basis, I fear that The media industry is making things difficult. It is enough that users resort to other methods of obtaining content.
