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Credit: Inside the MagicMax, the streaming service owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, is taking notes from competitors like Netflix and Disney+ but angering its customers in the process.
The service was launched in 2020, just a year after Disney+ entered the extremely competitive streaming market, and was originally branded as HBO Max. This made a lot of sense at the time, as the HBO brand has been one of Warner Bros’ most distinctive and critically acclaimed for years.
Additionally, subscribers who wanted to watch Game of Thrones and Insecure reruns had recently struggled through the company’s very rocky transition to streaming (which included two separate services, HBO Go and HBO Now), so a single unified, relatively simple app made sense. For a moment, it seemed like WarnerMedia actually had a service that would be able to compete with Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and the other major streamers.
Related: Disney Already Wants To Charge Subscribers Even More for Password Protection
Then WarnerMedia merged with Discovery Inc., and new CEO David Zaslav launched a ruthless campaign of cost-cutting and layoffs to offset the billions of dollars of debt the new Warner Bros. Discovery was saddled with (not to mention his own staggering nine-figure salary). HBO Max was rebranded as Max in a wildly confusing move, and now, the company has announced that the Max streaming service will join the other major platforms by cracking down on password-sharing beginning in 2025 (per Bloomberg).
On one hand, there is logic to that decision. Password sharing allows innumerable audience members to watch Max original TV shows and movies without paying a monthly subscription fee; in the minds of executives everywhere, money a company doesn’t receive is money it has actively lost. Given that David Zaslav announced that his primary mission at Warner Bros. is to cut losses and increase revenue, it was probably a given that Max would eventually try to ban password-sharing.
Credit: Warner Bros Discovery
On the other hand, this kind of crackdown has been extremely unpopular for Disney+ and Netflix. It is too early in the process to see whether streaming services make enough money with draconian rules to prevent people from letting friends and family use their accounts to offset potential losses to their subscriber bases and threatened boycotts. At the very least, it is certain that very few customers are happy that they have new rules to follow that can get their accounts suspended or upcharged if they’re not careful.
Related: After Losing Millions, Disney+ Bans Password Sharing
It is also worth mentioning that both Disney+ and Netflix have long-established brand identities and huge catalogs of original content to help them maintain their subscribers, while Max is most famous for being HBO Max five minutes ago and repeatedly deleting content while raising prices and forcing ad breaks. Max may simply not have the kind of goodwill it needs to force this kind of change.
Will you keep paying for a Max subscription when it bans password-sharing? Let us know in the comments below!