Disney likes money. A lot. The 20-something MCU movies and numerous spinoff shows are good indications of that. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear the company wants more and it doesn’t even have to work that hard to get it. Rivals like Netflix have already done the thinking, Disney’s just peering over their shoulder to copy its ‘crackdown on password sharing’ homework.
It’s worth mentioning that the streamer is also hiking its prices (again) in the US. South Africa has been shown mercy on that front, having just suffered through a R20/m increase in July. That doesn’t mean we’ll be spared forever, which… isn’t a particularly comforting thought.
Crackdown imminent (not the Xbox game)
While the streamer’s price hikes aren’t affecting South Africans (yet), it seems Disney’s announcement of a password crackdown in the same vein as Netflix’s appears to be more of a global threat. The news comes straight from the horse’s mouth, with Disney CEO Bob Iger announcing the impending changes during the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call.
“We are actively exploring ways to address account sharing and the best options for paying subscribers to share their accounts with friends and family,” Iger said. “Later this year, we will begin to update our subscriber agreements with additional terms and our sharing policies. And we will roll out tactics to drive monetization sometime in 2024.”
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If your business jargon is a little rusty, we’ll see Disney’s new password-sharing regime come into effect sometime in 2024. The earnings call didn’t go into any specifics of how the crackdown would be implemented, with Iger even admitting he’s not sure if such a drastic change would drive new business to the service. Despite all that, the company still described the new rules as a “priority.”
Our guess? Disney+’s new rules will almost be identical to that of Netflix’s – which currently holds a one household per subscription deal in place. And why not? Netflix’s new regime is (unfortunately) working, having boosted the company’s subscriber base in the US by 200,000 in June. We don’t have recent figures to go off, but we can make an educated guess that trend is continuing. People really like Stranger Things, we guess?