After Netflix, Disney+ is in turn tackling account sharing, by starting to prohibit using a subscription outside the home. A way to replenish its coffers, while the service is not yet profitable.
We suspected it, but this time, there it is: Disney++ has just taken the plunge to end account sharing! While, this summer, the family entertainment giant had clearly expressed its wish to fight against this practice, subscribers received emails this week notifying them of changes made to the user contract for its streaming platform, which includes “restrictions on account sharing”as reported The Verge. And Canada is the first territory to pay the price. The streaming platform will begin to crack down on the land of maple syrup from 1er next November. And others are expected to follow quickly.
From now on, Disney+ account holders will no longer have the right to share their subscription outside of their household, which is defined as “all devices associated with your primary personal residence and the people who reside there”. The subscription contract clearly indicates that the service has the means to analyze the activity of its users. And the firm is not joking, because “if we determine that you have violated this Agreement, we may restrict or terminate access to the Service” ! As with Netflix, it should be possible to add additional members to your household for a fee – Netflix charges €5.99 for an additional member in France. The agreement also states that the new rules will apply to all subscribers “unless otherwise authorized by your service level”. Enough to leave the door open to a new, more expensive offer that would allow account sharing?
Disney+ account sharing: soon to be over, like at Netflix?
Long feared, the end of account sharing for Netflix subscribers was a real tremor in the world of streaming. This practice, although very popular, is more than ever on the rise, with the proliferation of SVODs and significant increases in prices. The Red N strategy was risky because such a policy change could have caused many customers to leave.
Ultimately, the opposite happened, and six million new users finally decided to take out a new subscription between April and June 2023, which is much more than the departures. And that’s without counting the users who agreed to pay the additional €5.99 to add a member from outside the household to already existing accounts! This obviously gave ideas to some of its competitors since, almost three months after Netflix, i.e. at the beginning of August 2023, Disney+ was preparing to test a restriction on account sharing in India, as reported by the British press agency. Reuters.
End of account sharing: a limited number of devices
In India, the platform would not rely on the location of devices, but rather rely on the number of connected devices. In India, the big-eared company offers a platform called Disney+ Hotstar, the number one SVOD in the country with more than fifty million subscribers. It offers three offers: Free (with a usage limitation), Super (899 rupees per year, or €9.95) and Premium (1499 rupees per year, or €16.60). It is possible to watch on four streams simultaneously and each account can register up to ten devices.
With the new rule, this number would drop to “only” four for Premium accounts and, subsequently, two for Super accounts. A source close to the matter explained to Reuters that “some people will be encouraged to buy” their own subscription once the Disney+ strategy is formalized. However, the measure should not be too restrictive, as only 5% of users in the country connect to more than four devices.
If the sharing restrictions do not concern France for the moment, there is no doubt that we will be entitled to them later – as well as the rest of the world – once the company has validated the test results and found the best method to apply. Especially since the platform needs to replenish its coffers. Indeed, after having invested generously in the production of original series and films – in particular for Star Wars and the Marvel universe – the big-eared company must confront profitability issues. And this is not the first time that she has looked towards Netflix to find the solution. At the end of December, it launched Disney+ Basic in the United States, a subscription partly financed by advertising, and increased its prices (see our article). A price change arriving in France… on November 1st! Definitely!