HBO Max To Get Even More Obnoxious About Password Sharing

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the enshittify-ALL-the-things! dept

The sort of executives who fail upward into positions of prominence at major media and streaming companies are all out of original ideas. So as the Wall Street pressure for impossible, perpetual quarterly growth mounts, they’ve increasingly resorted to the same tactics we’ve long seen at major shitty cable companies like Comcast.

For streaming video that has meant a lot of pointless mergers (and the resulting layoffs, price hikes, and quality erosion), pushing more advertisements into every viewing minute, and generally nickel-and-diming their customers to death. For walking disasters like Time Warner Discovery, that’s also meant a crackdown on password sharing, which company executives say is about to get much worse:

“Several months of testing has enabled WBD to determine “who’s a legitimate user who may not be a legitimate user,” Perrette said. Once that is determined, he continued, the next step is to “turn on the more aggressive language around what needs to happen” in order to and make sure that “we are putting the net in the right place, so to speak.”

You might recall that early on, streaming executives loved password sharing. HBO and Netflix saw it as effectively a form of free advertising, which would encourage people to sign up for service. They actively encouraged it. But now that U.S. streaming growth has saturated in the U.S., they still need their improved quarterly returns. And you certainly can’t achieve that by spending more money on labor and content.

So the push is afoot to generally cut corners and goose profits, or enshittification. In streaming, that also includes harassing people who used a friend’s or parent’s password into signing for their own service. The executive assumption is that people will actually want to do that, as opposed to say, just cancelling service or pirating the content with a VPN and BitTorrent.

It’s understandable executives want people viewing their streaming content to pay for it. The problem is that with the other hand, these same executives, through harmful mergers, new restrictions, price cuts, layoffs, and general quality erosion, are ensuring that it’s less compelling than ever for consumers to actually sign up for their own account.

There’s really no escape from this doom loop, as traditional cable companies long demonstrated. The kind of stuff streaming consumers want (better customer support, lower prices, better features, higher quality content) hurt quarterly revenues. So the process switches to a form of product and brand cannibalization by the extraction class, which is where enshittification enters the frame.

Some of these efforts may temporarily goose earnings (the press tends to credulously parrot claims password sharing crackdowns are goosing earnings, even though streaming companies usually offer no hard data to confirm it), but ultimately the check comes due in the form of merger debt and customer defections. At that point, the executives responsible have likely already moved on to other companies to engage in the same sort of “savvy deal-making,” and the cycle begins again.

When piracy inevitably sees a resurgence, the media executives that remain will blame everything (generational entitlement! China! VPNs!) but themselves. And the cycle continues until piracy or new market disruption forces the companies in question to re-assess their choices. That last part, as the cable TV industry’s slow migration to streaming demonstrated, always takes much longer than it should.

Filed Under: competition, enshittification, hbo, password sharing, streaming, video
Companies: hbo, warner bros. discovery