HBO Max is about to get ‘aggressive’ to stop password sharing

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The days of streaming service password sharing seem to be ending fast. HBO Max just signaled that it’s about to launch an “aggressive” campaign to snuff out password sharing among subscribers. Here’s what that means.

Last fall, HBO Max—which at the time was just Max, and had a blue logo—said it would start telling password sharers they had to pay more for the privilege.

It seems that campaign didn’t move the needle much.

JB Perrette, head of streaming for HBO Max, revealed on the company’s recent quarterly earnings call that it plans to get “much more aggressive” about eliminating password sharing.

Dade Hayes writes at Deadline:

Several months of testing has enabled WBD to determine “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user,” Perrette said. Once that is determined, he continued, the next step is to “turn on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen”…By the fourth quarter, he said, the process will be happening “in a much more aggressive fashion.”

“The message language right now has been a fairly soft, cancel-able message,” he said. 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.”

HBO Max does offer subscribers an add-on option to pay for additional viewers outside their household.

However, it’s not necessarily a great deal for users, since HBO Max can often be found at discounted rates or bundled with other streamers for less.

That said, if you currently share an HBO Max account with someone not in the same household, it sounds like you’ll need to pay up or find another streaming service soon.