Once Netflix announced they were cracking down on password sharing, I knew the other streamers would follow suit. Bob Iger was the longtime CEO of Disney before retiring in 2020. Then another Bob, Bob Chapek, took over. Other Bob was awful, managing both to alienate Disney’s creative talent and make bad business decisions. Bob Iger was called out of retirement as clean-up man in November 2022. But I don’t think Bob the First is doing so hot in his second term as CEO. The latest sign of trouble? Iger admitted in an earnings call that password sharing was an issue he wanted to address soon, with policies being changed later this year and actually rolled out in 2024. Disney is also hiking up prices for its streaming platforms, starting on October 1st. The ad-free tiers of Hulu and Disney+ are both increasing by $3 a month to $17.99 and $13.99 respectively, and ESPN is also increasing by $1 a month. Disney+ has a decent subscriber base of 105 million people, but they are experiencing a lot of churn. The fact that they’re going to get rid of password sharing honestly seems like another death knell for streaming as we know it.
Disney is officially following Netflix’s lead: “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 on Disney’s quarterly earnings call Aug. 9. “Later this year, we will begin to update our subscriber agreements with additional terms on our sharing policies, and we will roll out tactics to drive monetization sometime in 2024.”
Their terms of service don’t say anything about password sharing: Currently, in the subscriber agreements for Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu, the only mention of password-sharing is that customers may not “share your login credentials with third parties.” Right now, they don’t specifically address whether it’s OK to let friends or family members who don’t live in the same household use the accounts.
Bob Iger’s cagey about specifics: Iger, responding to an analyst’s question about how widespread the issue of password sharing is for Disney+ and its other service, declined to get into specifics. “I’m not going to give you a specific number, except to say that it’s significant,” he said. “What we don’t know, of course, is as we get to work on this, how much of the password sharing as we basically eliminate it will convert to growth in subs. Obviously, we believe there will be some, but we’re not speculating.”
Iger continued, “What we are saying, though, is that in calendar ’24, we’re going to get at this issue. And so while it is likely you’ll see some impact in calendar ’24, it’s possible that we won’t be complete or the work will not be completed within the calendar year. But we certainly have established this as a real priority. And we actually think that there’s an opportunity here to help us grow our business.”
I remember the days when it seemed like Disney was invincible–I am, after all, a millennial–but every Troy must fall. They haven’t had an original, non-remake Disney movie truly pierce the zeitgeist since Frozen, and that came out in 2013. Frozen was inescapable for months. There have been some very good Disney movies since then, but so much of their output now is live-action remakes of varying quality and reiterations of other IPs like Star Wars and Marvel. My marketing/branding background is kicking in here but I think I’ve just noticed a critical problem. Disney thinks its brand is mostly about nostalgia, but it’s not. Nostalgia isn’t the whole brand. Disney is also supposed to be about imagination and dreams and magic. You don’t get “magic” by regurgitating the same stories over and over again. They need to do something fresh with their content strategy to justify these price hikes and crackdowns on passwords–or if they want to grow their subscriber base.
Bob Iger dances around this but I think they will initially lose some subscribers if they start making it impossible for people to share passwords with their families. People just can’t afford having so many streaming services. Let’s not forget that Bob Iger said that the striking writers and actors are being “unrealistic” about their demands for higher wages and protections from AI encroachment. He makes $27 million a year. Meanwhile he’s out here nickel-and-diming Disney+ subscribers, wanting to make it impossible for you to share your Hulu password with your grandma, and calling it “disturbing” that actors want to be able to (*checks notes*) earn a living wage and have health insurance. What a sweetheart!
Photos credit: Richard Harbaugh / Avalon, Justin Ng / Avalon, Getty Images
They’re going to loose subscribers this way as I can’t imagine people will find the value there.
We did the math and if I can’t password share it’s cheaper for me to go with something else or buy dvd’s/copies of what we watch. 300+ a year is a lot of shows I can own instead of stream.
I’d miss a few shows I’ve enjoyed but truly the cost outweighs the benefits.
An added bonus is that we will watch less instead of trying to find something to watch or in general spend less time watching tv which I’m more than happy with
Same!
I pay for Disney+ yearly so I will continue to have it until it expires next year but not renewing it… Prime membership runs out at the end of this month and will not renew it either.
We got rid of cable as it was getting so expensive plus Xfinity has horrible customer support. We went with Hulu live which 3 years ago was under $50. Hulu we like but it is mandatory to have ESPN+ and Disney, which we don’t watch. It is now over $80 IN THREE YEARS!
This is really frustrating to me because we subscribed on the first day because they were blatantly advertising password sharing as a benefit. I forget the specifics but that fact that each subscription could have 4 different accounts that are watching simultaneously was the draw for me and my group.
I LOVE Disney and love having access to all their movies but I just don’t think I can justify the price when I have most on DVD anyway. Right now I only pay ~$4/month (since we split the price) and I’m not going to pay 3x that.
I don’t believe it’s 4 different, individual accounts. We’ve been in from day 1 as well. My account has 4 users (me, my mother, and two kids) who all log in under one credential, but under that, each person’s watch list is different.
I think the problem is when you share your password with more than those 4 users and you have 10 people using the account, which, I mean, that’s fair of the streamers to want to stop.
My issue that I’m looking at is if they start tracking IP addresses and want to cut off my college students living out of state. Yeah, that’s not going to fly.
We have 4 different households using our account (my siblings + my friend and I). The only limitation is that we can only have 4 people streaming at once, which is fine because my family only watches things together (same with the other households). They never specified the 4 accounts had to be in the same household.
Corporate greed knows no bounds. It’s all about the numbers and as you rightly point out, the creativity has absolutely taken a back seat.
My mother is retired (and pretty broke) and no longer gets to watch netflix since they stopped her using our login and if they’re going to hike the price for Disney as well I think we’d ditch it altogether rather than pay extra extra to keep it ourselves and have her on the account.
I’ve finally reached S7 of Buffy so as long as I can finish that and watch Ms Marvel before The Marvels comes out in November I’m good. I’ll happily cancel it for a bit and then might sign up for a couple of months maybe over Christmas 2024 to catch up on things but I could absolutely live without it day to day. Mum has watched the Golden Girls twice through so she’s probably good too.
Disney was always about magic, not nostalgia. Sure, we’re nostalgic NOW, but at its core, people want the magic. That is what has been stripped away at the resorts. I won’t go there again because I remember what it was like even 10 years ago. Even my Disney loving kids don’t want to go.
They’ve started nickel and diming too much at the resorts and the parks. The perks of staying onsite used to be the magical express (gone), earlier fast pass reservations (FP – gone), and extra magic hours (I think they still have these but not sure.) But the loss of the magical express and FP are huge in my opinion. Yes I can pay for Genie plus and lightning lane but its not like the resorts are any cheaper, so I’m just paying that much more. And park tickets are more expensive.
I love WDW and we go once every 18 months or so but at this point the prices are just insane. And they were always high. But they keep taking away the benefits and raising the prices and it just comes off as greedy, which is not magical at all.
To your point about magic 🪄, OG Bella: YES!! I loved that Disney magical feeling. Remember Escape to Witch Mountain, w Kim Richards??!! I remember being so caught up in that magic and their journey. It made me feel like random magic was hidden everywhere and that it could touch anyone at anytime, it’s that sparkling ✨ anticipatory excitement for the GOOD in the 🌎, in humanity, the innocence that sees the best path to re-right our ships, rewrite our own scripts and flip them. To borrow from another magical film, the idea that someone can ‘change their stars’ is supremely uplifting and deeply comforting. It’s magic for the masses, if you will. The magic was a big part of the Disney experience to me. It’s all over their parks, I did a Disney bday party for my kid once at Disneyland and we had the BEST time, two amazing days together! I love to see those dashes of magic in real life, even the tiniest sprinkles. Now don’t get me started on Disney movies- cuz to me, so many have that ‘random magic’ – I have too many faves, Freaky Fridays (both!) Pollyanna 💕, PARENT TRAP OG was my jam and I adore the Lindsay version too, can’t even w Lady and the Tramp, THE RESCUERS – I love the voice work with animation in films too- adore so many of their earlier films like That Darn Cat!, FLUBBER, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Castaways, Swiss Family Robinson, MARY POPPINS, + The Lion King, Tarzan, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, like I gotta stop 🛑. ✨
Encanto was a pretty big cultural phenomenon, thanks to “we dont talk about bruno” and Lin Manuel Miranda. It didnt do that well at the box office but that was 2021, a lot of people were still in pandemic mode.
I think their big issue is that Disney+ is really kid-centric. We watch the Marvel and Star Wars original series but those are getting old. And when that’s all there is really for adults in terms of new content, My kids watch Disney+ almost exclusively when they’re watching TV, and I’ll turn it on for specific movies, but I never wonder “what series is Disney making next?”
That said because I do have two young children (well young-ish it feels like these days), I will keep subscribing to Disney+ because of the Disney vault. But my mom, for example, had disney plus for a few months and then cancelled it because there wasn’t anything on there for her. The vault is going to appeal to a lot of people but i don’t think its going to bring in new subscribers on a regular basis.
My guess is they are also paying close attention to Netflix.
Blah meant to say “when that’s all there is really for adults in terms of new content, is it worth it?”
I signed up for Disney+ the first year it came out. I got the annual package and I kept renewing it but I cancelled it this year because there wasn’t a whole lot to watch. I don’t have any little kids, I signed up for the Marvel shows but most of them have been duds. I’m surprised that Disney and company really dropped the ball with this.
Between Prime, Netflix, Tubi, Freevee and YouTube, there’s more content available than I can ever watch. I cancelled Hulu, Disney and Max earlier this year and it hasn’t bothered me one bit. Streaming services are pricing themselves right out of their customer bases.
Seriously. Even when Peak TV hit, there was already too much to watch.
As well, streaming services made the mistake of thinking subscribers will stay service-loyal. From what I’ve seen, people join because of a few shows, but when those are done, they are done. I don’t see a lot of people raving about Netflix per se—they rave about the individual content.
I got so tired of all these subscription services I went out and bought a $6 DVD/Blu ray player from the thrift store and now I exclusively get my tv and movies from my local library. It’s given me more free time for hobbies and reading. I just don’t see the value in many of these services anymore, the content sucks and the shows I do like always get canceled, I’m over it.
Same! My local library network has just about everything. My budget doesn’t stretch to more than one streaming service at a time.
And can we talk about how broadband internet by itself is now close to the price cable was when I decided to cut the cord? Everyone is raising prices, no one is raising wages.
“ And can we talk about how broadband internet by itself is now close to the price cable was when I decided to cut the cord? Everyone is raising prices, no one is raising wages.”
OMG YES!!! I was paying $130 for internet + cable with Comcast. A few years ago I cancelled the cable part because we only watched Netflix anyway, and I was sick of paying that much. Now I’m already up to paying $89 A MONTH to Comcast for just internet. I hate it. I canceled MAX, and Hulu LIVE. Went down to the ‘less than $10 Hulu subscription’! I was paying way more than $130 a month between internet and all the streaming services. I’m so done.
I was able to use my sisters Netflix password foe 15 years and just had to breakdown and get my own Netflix. Ugh. They are all worth hundreds of millions. Let me use my sisters password since they advertised TO SHARE YOUR PASSWORD. I’m about to go full Amish and cancel it alllll. Comcast has a monopoly on the internet in my area, and I swear half the time my service is down. Real kicker?! I was double paying for Disney+ for 3 years and had no idea. 🤡 Disney+ was in our Hulu bundle apparently and I didn’t know. 😭 ugh. Over it all and ready to be down to just Netflix and internet.
My boyfriend is a film director and my place looks like a Film archive so we have multiple versions of films and TV shows plus bluray/dvd players (yes, plural lol)
We have most streamers available to us but we do share with our family so IDK what’s gonna happen. We keep Disney+ mainly for our nephews but it’s a combo with Star+, which we do watch regularly.
I think most people will start cancelling and rejoining IF there’s something new they want to watch. I could probably just watch Netflix/Max and cancel everything else.
We just bought a DVD player too! And have started a collection of films and shows.
Disney was always evil and had horrible, anti-worker business practices. People just forgot that when Disney butted heads with an even bigger evil, DeSantis. But Disney donated heavily to republican candidates, and supported the “don’t say gay” laws, right up until they didn’t. Disney is partly to blame for the existence of these laws in the first place.
Anyhoo, I think streaming will eventually go one of two ways: you start to pick and chose which services you want as a bundle and pay one rate for it, like how we can choose channels with cable subscriptions. So it will look like another iteration of cable. Or, the streaming services will go away and content can be bought a la carte, the way you can purchase a digital movie from Amazon. But I don’t see these streaming services staying in business as they currently are in the long run.
“Disney is also supposed to be about imagination and dreams and magic. You don’t get “magic” by regurgitating the same stories over and over again.”
Yep. Disney is like Apple—more than any other companies, they need true creative and business geniuses at their helm. Their brand is magic/tech-magic/imagination, and there’s only so much profit they can live on before that well needs refilling. Disney’s history has always been your basic creative-boom-complacency/retread-crash, and those slumps can last quite a while. They have done a good job making more diverse projects, but they need to gamble on fresh IP ASAP.
I don’t understand why this guy is adamant on upsetting & alienating the public. What an odd move for someone who has political aspirations! If I was American voter I’d keep this in mind the next time he or his friend is running
So tone deaf doing this+ hiking fees whilst denying actors,writers their fair dues. These execs are so underestimating the power of viewers, I no longer pay subscription neither on Spotify*after H&M left them* nor any streaming as I can easily watch anything for free via pirated sites. I read last week that actors writers from hit shows are getting pennies in residuals while studios pocket millions. That’s so unfair
These streaming services need to offer family plans where one account will pay for, say, two households. Otherwise, most of these streaming services are not worth paying for every month. What will happen is people will subscribe for one month out of the year to catch up on what they’ve missed, then cancel. They should aim to KEEP subscribers every month – not alienating them into canceling completely.