With generous usage guidelines four concurrent streams, up to seven user profiles per account, Disney+ is inevitably going to be shared by people.
The service is meant to be enjoyed by everyone in your household, but there will also likely be people who share their passwords with friends across the country. Disney will allow Disney+ subscribers to share their accounts with other users — for the time being.
Speaking to The Verge, Michael Paull, president of Disney Streaming Services, said Disney will monitor password sharing activity and crack down in certain cases.
“Password sharing is definitely something we think about,” Michael Paull, president of Disney Streaming Services, said during a Disney+ media preview. According to Paull, Disney is hopeful that customers will recognize just how much they’re getting for $6.99 US per month ($8.99 CAD) and use the service within reason.
“We believe that consumers will see that value, and they’re going to act accordingly,” he said. “They’re going to use those accounts for their family, for their household. That being said, we do recognize password sharing exists and will continue to exist.”
But Disney has tools at its disposal if password sharing gets out of hand or becomes an obstacle that stunts Disney+’s growth. “We have created some technology that’s in the backend that we will use to understand behavior,” Paull said. “And when we see behavior that doesn’t make sense, we have mechanisms that we’ve put in place that will deal with it.”
The company knows what devices you’re using to stream the service. If that list of hardware grows unusually long for a single account, there’s one red flag Disney could take into account. Disney+ does not ask for location permissions when used on mobile devices, but it can’t be that difficult for the company to approximate your general region through its data servers and other backend methods.
But even if it does have measures in place to combat excessive password sharing, Disney doesn’t want to turn the dial to a point where things become annoyingly restrictive for customers, so for now, you’re probably okay to let your friends and family get a sample of Disney+.
