It won’t have dragged on. A few months after its launch in France, Max is already tightening the screws regarding account sharing outside the same household. The company is following in the footsteps of Netflix and Disney+, discussing its plans for the deployment of this new measure. Like Disney+ before it, the platform will first use the gentle method before blocking profiles which “squatting” a friend’s account or a family member living far away. From the year 2025of premiers mails will be sent to remind you of the conditions of use of the American platform. In fact, a Max account is only accessible to residents of the same household. However, many users exchange their passwords with loved ones to save on an increasingly steep bill for fans of serial productions. According to financial director Gunnar Wiedenfels, this repression will nevertheless be gradual, it should be spread over the years 2025 and 2026. First, users will be prompted to subscribe to a paid option to add an external profile.
This was Netflix’s strategy to end account sharing, a well-executed operation that benefited its ad-supported offering. According to Wiedenfels, Max’s project thus looks more like “a form of Price increase”because the company “asking members who are not registered or members of multiple households to pay a little more”. The amount of this supplement has not been communicated, we can expect it to coincide with the price of a subscription “Basic with advertising” either 5.99 euros per month for France. At a time when profitability is at the heart of the concerns of the SVOD giants, the repression of account sharing at Max is not really a surprise. As is often the case, one must expect that measures of this type will be first rolled out in select North American markets before investing in our regions. The machine is however in motion, and this will undoubtedly not be the only measure taken by Warner Bros Discovery to increase its margins.
Towards an increase in price?
During the presentation of the company’s quarterly results (until September 30, 2024), Gunnar Wiedenfels also suggested that a price revision was also in the company’s pipeline. With a Premium subscription billed at 13.99 euros per month, the service is among the “good deals” in the sector. According to the financial director, the nature “Premium” of the service offers a “enough room for maneuver to continue to offer a reasonable price” while encouraging investment in new content. In the United States, however, prices were revised upwards last June. This only concerns subscriptions without advertising, none of its competitors having so far not recorded a move above the 8 dollar mark.
For now, Max has no less than 110.5 million subscribers worldwide. Over the past three months, the service has seen its number of paying users jump by 7.2 million, undoubtedly helped by the arrival of Max in several European territories including France. The holding of the Olympic Games was also favorable to the streaming service, the competition having taken place in Paris reached the 215 million cumulative views over the summer period. This is 23% than in 2020 in Tokyo. Finally, on the fiction side, the launch of The Penguin was a great success. This is one of the best debuts for a new series, as well as The Last of Us or even House of the Dragon.
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