How will Disney+’s crackdown on password sharing affect you?
When streaming first emerged, everyone thought it would be the ultimate revision of cable: no ads and more variety, all for a significantly cheaper monthly price tag. Oh, how naive we all were.
Instead, the cost of streaming services has been soaring upwards, with ad-inclusive tiers now running for the prices Hulu and such used to be. Companies will say that prices have been soaring because of password sharing, but we’ve all been password sharing because they’re charging too damn much for their services. It’s exhausting, all the more so because streamers like Netflix have been taking drastic measures to cut down on password sharing. As it turns out, Disney Plus will now do so, too.
In the final week of September, Disney Plus started informing subscribers about “paid-sharing options.” Members will be asked to “update household” when viewing away from their main in-home device. Anyone outside the main subscriber’s “household” will have to either be added as an “extra member” (which costs extra) or sign up and start paying for their own account.
The prices listed on the email are $7.99 for a base account with no ads, and $9.99 for an ad-free account with one extra member. But this listing is cruelly misleading because Disney Plus prices are set to rise next month. The base ad-inclusive plan, for instance, will be $9.99 a month starting on October 17.
The Extra Member add-on launched for Disney Plus subscribers in the US, Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Europe, the UK, and the Asia-Pacific region. Like with Netflix, the joke’s on Disney—they’re about to lose my viewership altogether.
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