Your Disney+ accounts might be getting a little hard to access. After a slew of other streamers started cracking down on password sharing, the streaming service is the latest to get serious about making sure that people living in different places have separate accounts.
Disney’s crackdown has started by announcing a “paid sharing” program, and it broke that program down in detail in a new blog post. According to the post, this new program offers users two options.
The first is that users who want to add someone to their account who lives outside their household can do so by paying $6.99/mo. for an additional basic membership, or $9.99/mo. for a premium membership. Those are discounted from the usual subscriber rates, but that can only be done for a single user, and it isn’t available for users who are bundling Disney+ with any other streaming service.
The other option is more what you might expect. Users who are trying to share with separate households can get their own Disney+ account, but Disney is giving users the chance to port their profile over from their old subscription, including watch history and other preferences.
Disney+ will automatically determine which users are in a household based on account activity, internet connections, and linked devices. If Disney detects any users operating outside of what it deems to be the “main household,” it will ask them to verify their location through a one-time passcode.
This effort is part of a broader sweep designed to make streaming platforms a viable long-term economic model. Results have generally been positive for the streamers, even if consumers wind up paying more as a result.
