Day: August 7, 2025

• HBO Max password sharers may soon be forced to pay up, or go back to Netflix.
• Warner Bros. Discovery is focused on password sharing as its streamer’s domestic growth slows.
• WBD’s streaming head said they’re identifying who’s a “legitimate user” so they’re “putting the net in the right place.”

Anyone borrowing a password for HBO Max should start binge-watching now.

Warner Bros. Discovery, the media company behind HBO Max and its many rebrands, just warned its streaming subscribers that its password-sharing crackdown is about to get serious.

Compared to Netflix and Disney, WBD has been lenient on its streaming password stealers. The HBO Max parent had been gently nudging its password sharers to add another account for $8 a month or get their own subscription, but it was more of a suggestion than a mandate.

That was “the first inning” of its account-sharing clampdown, WBD streaming head JB Perrette said on its second-quarter earnings call on Thursday. But the next inning is fast approaching.

Starting in September, HBO Max moochers will “actually start to see some messaging” telling them to pay up or else, Perrette said. Put simply, the days of being Mr. Nice Guy are over.

WBD has spent much of the last several months testing to figure out who’s a “legitimate user” of the streaming service, Perrette said. HBO Max’s testing happened so that when they decide to “turn on the more aggressive languaging around what needs to happen, we’re actually putting the net in the right place, so to speak,” Perrette said.

Translation: HBO Max is springing a trap for password moochers.

WBD had 125.7 million streaming subscribers as of the second quarter, up 3.4 million from early 2025. However, most of that growth came from overseas, where HBO Max is still rolling out in new countries. In the US, the HBO-centric streamer only added about 200,000 customers.

But HBO Max will start to reap the benefits of this crackdown in the fourth quarter and in 2026 as their password messaging continues “in a much more aggressive fashion,” Perrette said.

So anyone hoping to catch up on “The Last of Us” or stream “The Yogurt Shop Murders” without paying may want to start now.

• My partner and I live with two other roommates.
• We are four adults in our mid-20s, and we cook house dinners on Tuesdays.
• Our house is the typical suburban family home, but we don’t have kids and aren’t married.

When the four of us are gathered on our back patio, I wonder if our neighbors think we are swingers. We’re not. We are four friends living together in a single-family house in the suburbs.

I live with my partner, our two friends who are also coupled, and an orange cat. Some may boil this living arrangement down to four adults being roommates, but I would argue it is more than that. We are four adults in our late 20s and early 30s actively choosing to live together. Living together has filled a sense of community that many of us lack in adulthood.

We had a sense of community in college

Many adults our age lost that sense of community when we left college. In college, friends grabbed dinner, watched movies, reviewed each other’s papers, and got ready for and went to parties — all together.

But in our adulthood, friends rarely spend casual downtime together. We often have to coordinate schedules and plan four weeks in advance for a dinner. Each hangout is a planned ordeal with prepared plans and timetables, or dress codes. Or we see friends at weddings and other milestone parties, again with timetables and dress codes.

But with this living arrangement, our hangouts are casual and mostly unplanned. On weeknights, we watch basketball games and go into town for ice cream. On weekends, we disc golf or paddle on the river. We often make grocery runs together, discussing how bok choy fits into the following week’s meals or replenishing our communal fruit stash. And every spring, we plant various types of tomatoes, peppers, and herbs.

Like Sunday family dinners of previous generations, we cook a house dinner on Tuesday nights. These dinners are elaborate, three-course meals. We have delighted in strawberry semi-freddos, carrot cake, meatball subs, French onion soup, chicken piccata, fish and chips, Korean garlic cream buns, and falafel.

Every July, we invite friends over for a summer party, grilling burgers and throwing a disc around the backyard. And in December, we host our annual Christmas party with appetizers, a signature cocktail, and a gift exchange.

We moved into a single-family house

We weren’t anticipating this life when we first started living together. In May 2020, I was living in a basement apartment with a hot plate and mini fridge, and my partner and his friend were living in college apartments two years after graduating.

The three of us moved into an apartment together. Through the pandemic lockdown, we watched through the “Fast and Furious” franchise for the first time, Netflix’s Outer Banks, and Masterchef; adopted a cat and named him after a “Fast and Furious” character; and leaned into our cooking and baking.

With the help of my roommates adjusting our rent payments, I pursued a master’s degree. They read my papers, and it felt like my college days. When we outgrew the apartment and gained another roommate, we moved into a single-family house in a suburban development in a county that feeds into D.C..

We are surrounded by families

We are surrounded by parents with two to six kids, older adults who sent their kids off to college and spend their Saturdays manicuring their lawns, and just generally adults who conformed their lives to what was expected of them. Our four-bed, three-and-a-half bath with an unfinished basement suburban house traditionally reflects the nuclear family. An expectation that in it, one would fill it with a mom and a dad, a boy and a girl, a dog maybe. But we have filled it with two couples and a cat.

Many practices of modern everyday American life have changed through the 2020s. As our digital spaces grow and physical spaces diminish, and the cost of living rises with minimum wage remaining unchanged, we need a change in our style of living.

Traditionally, at our age, my partner and I are expected to be married, locked into a mortgage, and parenting at least our first child. But now, at our age, my partner and I are sharing a house with two friends, choosing the weeknight hangouts and joint annual parties. We still mow the grass, host annual parties, and live like a family would, but as four friends.