The Moment the Rules Changed
In the spring of 2023, Netflix began enforcing its long-standing but rarely applied rule against password sharing in the United States. Subscribers who had quietly extended their accounts to siblings in other cities or parents in other states were told to pay for an extra member slot — roughly $7.99 to $8 per month, depending on the plan — or lose access. The change was framed as a correction, a return to the original terms of service. It was also, plainly, a revenue decision.
What followed was one of the more consequential policy pivots in the brief history of streaming television. Disney+, Max, and Peacock all moved in the same direction over the following 18 months, each tightening household verification in their own ways. The era of the shared password — a defining social norm of the 2010s streaming boom — came to a formal close.
The question worth asking now, in mid-2026, is not whether the crackdowns happened. It is whether they worked, what they cost ordinary households, and what the landscape actually looks like for a viewer trying to decide what to subscribe to.
What the Numbers Show
The short answer on Netflix is that the crackdown worked, at least on the company’s own terms. In the two quarters immediately following the U.S. enforcement rollout, Netflix reported its strongest subscriber growth in years. By the end of 2023, the company had added more than 29 million net new subscribers globally — a figure the company’s own investor communications described as well above internal expectations. The logic was simple: a meaningful portion of password borrowers converted to paying accounts rather than go without access.
The longer answer is more textured. Netflix’s revenue growth was real, but it came alongside a structural shift in how subscribers were counted. The company stopped reporting subscriber numbers in early 2025, switching instead to reporting revenue and engagement hours. That decision, announced in January 2024 and effective the following year, makes apples-to-apples comparisons harder. Analysts who cover the company — including those at firms cited by trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter — have noted that the subscriber metric had become less useful as the company scaled its ad-supported tier, where average revenue per user differs materially from premium ad-free plans.
Disney+ had a rougher transition. The service lost subscribers through much of 2023 as it raised prices and restructured its bundle strategy, then stabilized in 2024. Its password-sharing enforcement was softer than Netflix’s — the company relied more on nudges and price differentiation than hard household locks — and its results were correspondingly less dramatic in either direction. According to Disney’s investor relations filings, Disney+ reached approximately 118 million subscribers by early 2025, a recovery from the declines of the prior year but below its peak of roughly 161 million in late 2022.
Peacock and Max are harder to assess because NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery report their subscriber metrics on different schedules and with different definitions. What is clear from both companies’ public filings is that neither achieved the kind of rapid subscriber conversion that Netflix did. Peacock has leaned heavily on live sports — particularly NFL games — as a retention mechanism, while Max has increasingly bundled its service with Disney+ and Hulu in a package that echoes, with some irony, the logic of the cable bundle that streaming was supposed to displace.
What Households Actually Paid
The direct cost to consumers is not difficult to calculate, even if the industry rarely presents it that way. Before the crackdowns, a single Netflix Standard plan at roughly $15.49 per month could realistically cover three or four people across two households. After, each additional household required either an extra member slot (around $7.99 to $8 per month) or its own subscription. A household that had been a quiet secondary user on a shared account now faced a choice: pay for their own plan, accept a cheaper ad-supported plan, or cancel.
Nielsen’s streaming measurement data, published through its regular The Gauge reports, has consistently shown that total streaming viewing share in the United States has grown even as individual service subscriptions have become more expensive. That finding points to a market that is growing in aggregate while individual services compete intensely for a finite pool of household entertainment spending. The practical result, documented in surveys by Pew Research Center and others, is that many households now subscribe to two or three services on a rotating basis — subscribing to watch a specific show, then canceling and picking up a different service the next month. This churn-and-return pattern was not caused solely by password-sharing enforcement, but it accelerated alongside it.
The ad-supported tiers complicate the household cost picture in a different way. Netflix Standard with Ads was priced at $6.99 per month at launch in late 2022, and Disney+ Basic with ads launched at a similar price point. By 2025, the Netflix ad-supported plan had risen to $7.99 per month in the United States, while the ad-free Standard tier was $15.49. A viewer willing to accept ads could theoretically subscribe to four services for the price of two premium ad-free plans. But the ad-supported viewing experience has drawn criticism: ad loads on streaming services have increased as the tiers have matured, with some estimates from industry analysts placing average ad loads at eight to ten minutes per hour on the major platforms by late 2025. That is below traditional broadcast television levels, but it represents a meaningful shift from the zero-ad experience that defined the original streaming value proposition.
The Quiet Return of the Bundle
Perhaps the most structurally significant development in the post-crackdown period is the re-bundling of streaming services. The Disney-Max-Hulu bundle, launched in the United States in 2024, was the most prominent example, but the pattern is broader. Verizon, Apple, and Amazon have all offered multi-service bundles through their own platforms at various points. The logic is straightforward: individual services have found churn rates difficult to manage, and bundling reduces the friction of cancellation by embedding multiple services into a single billing relationship.
Viewers who lived through the cable era will recognize the dynamic. The original pitch of streaming — pay only for what you want, cancel anytime — has not disappeared, but it has been qualified. A household that wants access to major-league sports, prestige drama, and a broad library of children’s content without ads is likely paying $40 to $60 per month across three or four services. That figure is below what most cable subscribers paid for equivalent content access in 2015, but it is also not the $8-a-month disruption that early streaming advocates described. Fullimedia’s ongoing coverage of entertainment and media convergence has tracked this bundling trend across multiple reporting cycles.
How to Think About It as a Viewer
The honest framing for a viewer in mid-2026 is this: the streaming landscape has matured into something more complicated, more expensive, and more fragmented than its early promise, but also more varied in its access points than traditional cable was.
A few practical observations are worth holding. First, the ad-supported tiers are now genuine products rather than introductory offers — they carry full libraries on most major platforms and are the entry point for the majority of new subscribers. Second, household verification is now standard across the major services, meaning that the economics of sharing have permanently changed. Third, the bundle is back, but it is a different kind of bundle: more modular, more cancelable, and without the forced packaging of local news and home shopping channels that made cable unpopular. Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends entirely on a household’s specific viewing habits.
The more durable question — one that the subscriber numbers and quarterly filings do not fully answer — is whether the content itself has kept pace with the price increases. That is a question about creative investment, not business models, and it is the one most likely to determine which services retain subscribers in the next phase of the market. Readers interested in how content decisions intersect with platform economics can explore that conversation further in Fullimedia’s weekly briefing.
Conclusion
The password-sharing crackdown achieved what it was designed to achieve for the companies that implemented it most aggressively, most notably Netflix, which converted a significant number of account borrowers into paying subscribers in 2023. The costs were borne partly by those households, partly by the market’s tolerance for ad-supported viewing, and partly by a general acceptance that the era of frictionless account sharing was over. What followed — rising prices, heavier ad loads on cheaper tiers, and a re-bundling of services that recalls cable’s own history — is neither a crisis nor a vindication. It is an industry that found a floor and is now determining, with its subscribers, what the ceiling looks like.
