Disney Plus will tackle account sharing this summer

Bob Iger shared his battle plan this week.

Preventing subscribers from sharing their account with friends or distant family, is this the miracle solution for streaming platforms? While Netflix saw its number of new customers explode in 2023 (the firm had 260 million at last count) after the implementation of its new policy, Disney Plus will follow the same path. With 150 million subscribers currently, the service is plateauing and CEO Bob Iger announces that he will launch his fight against account sharing from June 2024.

According to Variety, Iger said last Thursday that his company “will launch its first real foray into password sharing” at the beginning of summer.

He specifies that it is still an experience, which will affect “only a few countries in a few markets“, before “then expand significantly with a global deployment in September”. We do not yet know which countries will be the first targeted by the end of account sharing

So how will it work? What will be permitted and prohibited? According to Variety, Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ customers will have to start “invite password borrowers (those who use your accounts) to start their own subscriptions. Later in 2024, account holders who want to allow access to people outside their household will be able to add them for an additional fee.” Basically the same as Netflix today.

More generally, Bob Iger believes that his platform needs “technology tools to reduce churn and create more stickiness. These are things like recommendation engines, which allow us to know our customers better. We need to reduce marketing costs. We obviously need to reduce the cost of customer acquisition to increase margins.”