Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav recently explained why the company hasn’t made cracking down on HBO Max password sharing a priority thus far.
“We haven’t been pushing on the password sharing and the economics yet,” he said during a recent appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology conference, reported on by Variety. That said, it doesn’t mean that Zaslav doesn’t have a plan to start pushing back on the practice.
“People are really starting to love HBO Max. That’s the key. We want them to fall in love with our content, with our series, with the differentiated offering outside the U.S. and then over time, it’s a little tricky, with the password sharing, we’re going to begin to push on that,” he added, before suggesting further price rises are coming down the line.
“I think our ability to raise price as people become more and more in love with the quality that we have and the series that we have and the offering that we have will have a real ability because I think the pricing across the board — not only is there too many players, in order to stay alive, a lot of the players have just decided to drop prices aggressively,” Zaslav said.
The executive also noted: “Consumers in America would pay twice as much 10 years ago for content. People were spending, on average, $55 for content 10 years ago, and the quality of the content, the amount of content that we’re getting, the spend is 10 or 12 fold and they’re paying dramatically less. I think we want a good deal for consumers, but I think over time, there’s real opportunity, particularly for us, in that quality area, to raise price.”
That is, of course, the executive perspective — but a lot of movie and TV fans will tell you that there isn’t much leeway for prices going up on streaming memberships. In fact, the a la carte nature of streaming is already requiring many of us to pay a cable-like amount of money per month to access all the networks we care about, so raising those prices risks subscribers putting more services on their personal chopping blocks.
Well, you know how it goes in the corporate side of entertainment, particularly for Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery: they live, they learn.
If you are subscribing, check out everything coming to HBO Max in September 2025.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
