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Credit: Inside the MagicIt’s only a matter of time before Disney pulls the plug on millions of households and they won’t get to use their Disney+ accounts any longer.
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After four years, Disney+ is finally making some drastic changes. After launching with Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian, Disney has been seeing great success with their streaming platform, with viewership records breaking all the time. The only problem is that Disney decided to go a little overboard with the spending, and the platform was actually becoming a spending issue for the Walt Disney Company.
Earlier this year, Bob Iger announced that Disney+ would follow what Netflix did and have the platform crackdown on password sharing, making it very hard for families living in different households or friends to share passwords. When Netflix did this, there was a lot of backlash, which isn’t stopping Disney from following through with their plans.
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Disney wants families in the same household to use Disney+, and if they wish to share it with others, they can pay for a different tier to allow this. Canada will be the first country to face these changes in November with a new cheaper tier with ads coming that will be $7.99 a month. Alongside this, Variety reports that Disney isn’t going to be nice to those who choose to violate their terms. Obviously, there will be some who will try to sneak around Disney’s new guidelines, and for those people, Disney warns them that there’s a good chance they will face consequences.
Anyone who violates their guidelines could have their Disney+ account terminated or limited. It’s unclear when the United States or other countries will begin to see the password-sharing update on Disney+, but Bob Iger said it will happen sometime in 2024, if not sooner. For those sharing passwords at the moment, you aren’t breaking the rules just yet, but once Disney updates their guidelines (it’s not if, but when), you can expect the company to be very clear on the consequences of password sharing going forward.
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This change isn’t very family-friendly for college students or even families living in separate households. With all of the streaming platforms raising their subscription prices, it’s not easy for families to afford several platforms, so the best way to watch them all was to have people share them with family members, but that is now more expensive than ever. If anything, Disney might start to see, with the recent content cuts, that Disney+ might see waves of “new subscribers” once certain shows are released.
Marvel and Star Wars fans will bring customers back to renew their subscriptions or finally get their subscriptions, but that means they will only be around for around a month, and that’s not what the company wants. They want customers who will pay for the platform every month. With the current setup, it’s just not financially worth it for many people, and it will be a shame if Disney+ takes the harsh approach of terminating accounts left and right once the password-sharing crackdown begins. Releasing recent Disney movies like The Little Mermaid and Haunted Mansion will help, but it won’t be enough to keep people subscribed every month.
Do you think this will affect Disney+’s profitability? Let Inside the Magic know what you think!