After the rise of subscription services, people have been password-sharing to help save money for their friends and family. While some companies have seemingly been okay with the practice, others have been cracking down on sharing. Now, Disney+ joins the ranks of the latter as the media giant announces new rules on how password sharing works, and they’re a lot more restrictive than you may think.
Disney Breaks Down How Password Sharing on Disney+ Works
The company breaks down its new password-sharing rules on the Disney+ blog. Disney states that an account is meant to only be used within what it defines as a “household,” and if you want to share your account with someone outside of your household, there are now some strict rules you’ll need to obey.
First of all, you’ll need to purchase an account addon called “paid sharing” to share your account outside of your household. Disney says you’ll need to pay “$6.99 per month for Disney+ Basic subscriptions and $9.99 per month for Disney+ Premium subscriptions” on top of your regular fee.
On top of that, every account will only have one profile slot that it can share with people outside of the household, which Disney calls the “Extra Member profile.” Unfortunately, if you’re a Disney Bundle subscriber or you get your subscription through a supported partner, you won’t get the Extra Member profile.
What to Do After Disney’s Password Sharing Crackdown
Unfortunately, it seems you’ll need to play by Disney’s rules if you want to share your account with others. The company seems to be investing a lot of time and money into making it difficult for people to share passwords, including asking legitimate account holders to re-verify their accounts if they log in from a different location. Fortunately, there are plenty of reasons why Disney+ is worth the money, so anyone subscribing shouldn’t get buyer’s remorse.
That being said, this may be the perfect excuse to move to a different streaming platform. There are plenty of streaming services that still support password sharing, so if you still want to save money and share an account among family and friends, those may be a better fit for you. And while they won’t feature the same content as Disney+, it does seem that Disney’s platform will only get more frustrating to share accounts on as time goes on.
