If you’re a big enough shmuck to buy into the digital convince scam that are streaming services you genuinely deserve to be used and abused for corporate gain.
Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu, all under the ownership of Disney, recently updated their terms of service agreements to explicitly forbid viewers from “using another person’s username, password, or other account information” to gain access to their content.
In an email sent to its subscribers on Wednesday, Hulu announced that it would begin implementing “restrictions on sharing your account outside of your household,” starting March 14th.
“You agree not to impersonate or misrepresent your affiliation with any person or entity, including using another person’s username, password or other account information, or another person’s name or likeness, or provide false details for a parent or guardian,” the agreement terms say.
Disney, boasting a streaming catalog featuring Star Wars, Pixar, and Marvel movies, aims to achieve profitability with its streaming services this year, as indicated by earnings reports.
During a third-quarter earnings call last August, Disney’s chief executive, Bob Iger, hinted at the upcoming crackdown on password sharing. The company reported losses of $512 million on its three streaming services at the time.
Mr. Iger noted during the call that Disney believed there was a “significant” amount of password sharing among its users and anticipated that implementing restrictions would lead to growth in subscriber numbers.
“We certainly have established this as a real priority,” he stated. “And we actually think that there’s an opportunity here to help us grow our business.”
It’s an endeavor to propel its streaming services business into profitability as Disney seemingly continues to burn through its limitless capital, having burnt through $10 Billion dollars since it began its shift towards streaming services in 2019.
These streaming giants have taken extreme measures in their pursuit of profits. Netflix has recently eliminated the option for account sharing across different IP addresses, while all major platforms have raised their monthly subscription prices and introduced advertisements for lower-tier subscribers.
You would imagine that such a move would result in their sheeple customers boycotting them but in actuality the whole scheme is working like a charm, Netflix recorded an additional 13 million subscribers throughout Q4 2023 far exceeding expectations, entirely due to the fact that they’ve cracked the whip when it came to account sharing, so those “mooching” off others seemingly decided to just buy Netflix themselves.
After witnessing the type of “content” that Netflix has chosen to produce, such as ‘Cuties’ and “Big Mouth,” anyone subscribing to support them should resent their idiocy.
Now Disney is following suit because it’s a lucrative venture. Gutless mega-corporations persist in treating their customers as expendable assets with increasingly predatory business practices, and yet the customers themselves continue to enable this behavior by paying them.
I’m genuinely puzzled by how society as a whole has fallen into such anti-consumer traps. Piracy used to serve as a means to access content that wasn’t otherwise available or aired in your home nation and now, modern media is being purposefully gatekept behind streaming services.
The likes of Amazon, Disney and Netflix continue to extort consumers in hopes of increasing profits from millions into billions, providing paying customers with compressed digital footage that can otherwise be accessed for free without feeding the beast and getting bent over during the process.
