Hold onto your hats, kids. There’s a new sheriff in town. HBO Max is back from the dead and ready to “get aggressive” about its password-sharing crackdown. Warner Bros. Discovery shares that it’s been lobbing softballs so far, but don’t expect to get away with sharing your HBO Max password much longer. Nope. Why should a streamer miss even a dollar of your money? Here’s what JB Perrette, head of streaming and gaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, had to say about the upcoming “aggressive” password-sharing crackdown heading to HBO Max this September.
Perrette shared that Warner Bros. Discovery has spent the last few months testing to see “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user.” And now, the password-sharing crackdown at HBO Max can heat up as the streamer “turns on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen” to make sure that the streamer is “putting the net in the right place, so to speak.” Uhm, what net? We’re not sure we follow the metaphor, but it feels like HBO Max wants to trap all those pesky password-sharing hooligans in a net? A net of paying more money, anyway.
Right now, Perrette offers, switching metaphors, HBO Max is in its first inning of password-sharing crackdown efforts, but soon things will turn “more aggressive.” He notes, “The message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancel-able message. It will ‘start to get more fixed and such that people have to take action as opposed to right now, sort of having to be a voluntary process.’ And get this, “the real benefit will start probably in the fourth quarter and then kick in in 2026.”
The real benefit! It all sounds a bit like supervillain speak to us. We have to wonder if streamers like HBO Max aren’t already making enough money as it is—do they really need to crack down on every last password sharer? God speed streamers. We hope you avoid… the net.
Content shared from nerdist.com.