Disney Plus pairing password sharing crackdown with price hike

Disney became the latest streaming service to reveal a price increase, this week, with US customers to be impacted by hikes across the Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu services.

As if that wasn’t enough to annoy customers, Disney has piled-on the misery by revealing when the anticipated crackdown on users sharing passwords will begin.

In an earnings call on Tuesday, Disney CEO Bob Iger said (via Seeking Alpha) users can expect to see enforcement of the new policy, which they have been pre-warned about, from September.

Iger said: “[W]e’ve been talking a lot about adding the technology features that we need to basically make it a higher return, a higher margin business and a more successful business. And we’re doing that right now.

“We started our password sharing initiative in June. That kicks in, in earnest in September. By the way, we’ve had no backlash at all to the notifications that have gone out and to the work that we’ve already been doing.”

Netflix enjoyed success with its alternatives to password sharing, by giving account holders the opportunity to add extra members from outside their household for a fee.

Disney plans to follow a similar strategy, but is yet to reveal how much extra users will be asked to pay if they want to keep sharing accounts with people they don’t live with.

As for those price increases, both the ad-free and ad-supported plans are going up by $1-2 a month in October. That’d put the price of Disney+ up to $15.99 a month for Premium users in the United States, more than doubling the launch price.