Image: Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
Those “gentle” reminders to stop sharing HBO Max passwords are about to get tougher, the top exec from the streamer warns.
Warner Bros. Discovery streaming CEO JB Perette, who’s in charge of HBO Max, told investors this week that the streamer’s “soft” approach with password-sharing users will get “much more aggressive” in the months to come, according to Deadline.
Perette has long been insisting that HBO Max will get serious with password sharers. He issued a similar warning in May following Warner Bros. Discovery’s first-quarter 2025 earnings report, and he took the opportunity to repeat the promise during the company’s second-quarter conference call with investors.
Getting a tad more specific, Perette added that HBO Max has gained the ability to tell “who’s a legitimate user [and] who may not be a legitimate user,” thus allowing the streamer to ensure it’s “putting the net in the right place,” the Deadline report says.
Perette added that HBO Max’s efforts to curb password sharing will ramp up “in a much more aggressive faction” in the final quarter of 2025.
Earlier this year, HBO Max (back when it was still just “Max”) rolled out a way for subscribers to pay an additional charge for “extra members” outside their households. The cost is $7.99 a month for each “extra member” add-on slot, the same as what Netflix charges its own members to share their accounts.
Up until now, there haven’t been many consequences for those sharing HBO Max passwords without paying for them, aside from the occasional “gentle” reminder that you shouldn’t. Indeed, our own Jared Newman has advised against paying up for “extra members” until it’s “absolutely necessary.”
Perette has yet to get specific on how the streamer might enforce its new password sharing rules, although there are some clues if you scrutinize HBO Max’s terms of service.
For example, Max’s terms say that it can “modify access or disable features, including for security reasons, to limit the impact of account sharing outside of your household or where we have concluded in our discretion that there has been misuse of your HBO Max Account.”
While those are more extreme examples of what a streamer like HBO Max could do to block password-sharing freeloaders, it’s not clear that they would, and none of the big streamers has gone to such measures yet.
They also may not have to. Netflix, which has led the charge in terms of cracking down on password sharing, posted impressive numbers last quarter that beat Wall Street’s expectations, underlining the success of its thus far even-handed efforts.
Given Netflix’s encouraging performance, will HBO Max be content to keep its password-sharing crackdown closer to a slap on the wrist rather than a full-on IP block? We’ll have to wait and see.
Updated on August 7, 2025 with new commends form Warner Bros. Discovery CEO JB Perette on HBO Max’s password-sharing crackdown.
Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer, TechHive
Ben has been writing about technology and consumer electronics for more than 20 years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he has covered everything from smart speakers and soundbars to smart lights and security cameras. Ben’s articles have also appeared in PC Magazine, TIME, Wired, CNET, Men’s Fitness, Mobile Magazine, and more. Ben holds a master’s degree in English literature.
