If the pressure on the accounts policy from Wall Street sounds familiar, it should. Streaming services have often turned a blind eye to account sharing during their growth periods, only to walk back the leniency once viewers are hooked. Netflix tweeted in March of 2017 that “ Love is sharing a password ” before launching its own enforcement policies in May of 2023 . Later that year, Netflix raised prices up to 17 percent , and by April of 2024, the company saw the policy pay off with 9.3 million added subscriptions and a 54 percent bump in operating income. Netflix isn’t alone in the practice, as competitors like Max (now HBO again) and Disney+/Hulu eventually followed suit with their own policy enforcement.

Goldman’s report argues that while family plans are great for getting subscribers onto the platform, “the per-user monetization of these plans materially lags individual plan pricing.…