Hulu is officially following in the footsteps of corporate sibling Disney+ and streaming giant Netflix by implementing restrictions on the sharing of accounts and subscriber passwords. The move has been expected for several months.
New account-sharing rules for the streaming platform are set to take effect Nov. 1 north of the U.S. border, with U.S. subscriber agreements to be updated later this year.
Netflix just kicked off its big crackdown on illicit password-sharing users this spring — but co-CEO Greg Peters says there’s still a long road ahead of the company on this front. “We’ll be in the password-sharing business for some time,” Peters said, speaking Tuesday at the 2023 Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference. According to Peters, Netflix “built an elegant solution” to address the issue of informing users who were piggybacking on someone else’s account that they would need to pay for their own plan (or get added as an “extra member” for an additional fee).
By this time next year, consumers could be paying a lot more to binge Yellowstone, The Bear or Hijack if they’ve been mooching off the accounts of friends and family members, said Paul Erickson, a media and entertainment technology analyst and principal of Erickson Strategy & Insights.
Recent research by Samba TV and HarrisX may shed further light on how consumers are likely to respond to Netflix having last week moved to cut off free password sharing and charge $7.99 for adding an outside-the-household user. On the upside, more than four in 10 of the 2,500 U.S. adults polled at the end of March said they would be willing to pay more to share their account with someone outside of their home, with 41% saying they would pay up to $10 more per month, and another 10% that they would pay up to $15 more.
New analysis from Macquarie Research pegs Netflix’s imminent password sharing crackdown in the U.S. as a catalyst for growth on its ad-supported tier, with the potential for billions in annual incremental revenue in 2024.