Obviously Max is going to stop letting you share passwords soon

It was all over the moment the first person decided to open up their own wallet and accept the fact that they could no longer mooch off of someone else’s Netflix account. And by “it” we mean society in general. It’s been all downhill since July of last year, when Netflix gleefully announced that very few people had actually canceled their subscriptions over the company’s decision to crack down on people who were sharing passwords and that a good number of former password borrowers actually signed up for their own accounts. Disney barely waited a month before announcing that it would also stop letting people share passwords, first with Disney+ and more recently (with a more aggressive stance) Hulu.

And now, in a move that is only surprising because we assumed it had already happened, Max is also going to start cracking down on password sharing. Really, if there was ever going to be a password you were allowed to share in the entire history of passwords, there’s no way in hell it was ever going to be Max. It’s owned by a guy whose favorite hobby is twisting a piano wire around Wile E. Coyote’s neck in front of his friends and family so they can see the life drain out of his eyes. You think that guy is okay with you sharing your Max password? You think he won’t miss that $10-$20 a month? Get real.

Anyway, J.B. Perrette, Warner Bros. Discovery’s President/CEO Of Global Streaming And Games announced the upcoming crackdown at the 2024 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference this week, where it was surely met with the sort of uproarious applause that is normally reserved for a new Avengers trailer being shown in San Diego Comic-Con’s famous Hall H. This comes from Variety, which says Perrette even noted how “extremely” successful Netflix’s password crackdown was, and so he expects this to be “another growth opportunity” for Max. (Again, the sort of crowd that would attend this Morgan Stanley conference probably went nuts for that.)

We don’t know when Max’s anti-sharing crackdown will begin, but Perrette noted that it will be “starting later this year and into ’25.” Hey, they’ve gotta pay for that extremely necessary Harry Potter TV show somehow, right?

As for what you can do as a consumer, maybe consider not falling for this at some point? See, it’s not just that these companies are milking their users, it’s that they’re just operating on the assumption that they can do it and that they can keep doing it forever. Prices are going to keep going up and the services are going to keep getting worse as long as we all just keep mindlessly keep throwing money at companies like WBD and Netflix and Disney.