Disney is getting serious about laying down the law on people who share passwords for its streaming services, according to company CEO Bob Iger. Mark your calendars, password sharers, because it’s going to get a lot harder to share passwords beginning in June 2024.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Iger said the company would “launch its first real foray” into password-sharing this summer. The Disney CEO explained that the new restrictions will go into effect in a few countries at first and then be rolled out globally in September, a similar method used by competitors like Netflix.
While cracking down on password-sharing among users has been on Disney’s radar for a while—Iger said the number of people sharing passwords was “significant” in 2023—Iger’s comments suggest that the company hasn’t really taken a hard line on this issue until now.
Cracking down now does make sense. As explained by Iger, Disney expects its streaming business to be profitable in the fourth quarter after years of losses, which reached $4 billion a year at Disney Plus at one point. However, Iger said that the company had reduced the losses in this business to $130 million in the last quarter, a drastic difference from the money-burning machine it was before.
“We aim for this business to be a growth business for the company with margins our shareholders will feel good about,” Iger said.
Getting its streaming division to that point requires some changes, though. Iger said these include improving its recommendation engines to lower churn, being smarter about the shows it greenlights (particularly outside the U.S.), reducing the cost of customer acquisition—and cracking down on password sharing.
Iger’s announcement on password sharing comes two months after Disney Plus sent out an email to U.S. subscribers informing them that it was “adding limitations on sharing your account outside of your household,” according to a report in The Verge. Another one of its competitors, HBO Max, also intends to take measures to prevent users from sharing their passwords this year.
All in all, after the streamers are done, we may end up talking about password sharing like an old tech relic of the good ol’ days. But alas, they give us shows, I give them my money.