You’re Running Out of Time to Share Your Hulu Passwords
Bad news: Hulu is ditching Netflix . The streaming service will soon start blocking users’ passwords outside of the main account home, following in Netflix’s “innovative” footsteps, and we know the date when the change will go into effect.
Of course, this is hardly shocking. Disney, which announced plans to take sole control of Hulu later this year, is also introducing restrictions on password sharing for Disney+ . The ride-sharing ban is currently in effect in Canada, but will no doubt be expanded south whenever Disney wishes. The company is also changing its password policy for ESPN+, but it’s unclear exactly when those rules will begin to apply.
When will Hulu stop letting you share your passwords?
Your last day to split your monthly Hulu subscription fee with others outside your household (or just be a freeloader) is March 14th . As of this writing, this means you only have about a month and a half to exchange passwords before Hulu starts giving you problems. Like Netflix, Hulu will only allow account access to members of your “household,” which is “the set of devices associated with your primary personal residence that are used by the people who live there.”
Disney also updated the terms of service for Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ to emphasize that you can’t “impersonate” an account user, which is a weird way of saying “Don’t use their password.” The fine print change is as follows: “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 name or an image of another person or provide false information. for the parent or guardian.”
Can you bypass Hulu’s password sharing restrictions?
It’s too early to tell. According to Hulu’s terms, it links the “household” to devices connected to your personal residence. It will likely implement some latency when you take these devices outside of the house, say on vacation, and will occasionally ask you to reconnect to your home Internet to test. This means you can log into Hulu on your tablet at someone else’s house, and then watch in your own home for a while before being cut off again.
However, viewing through smart TVs can be difficult. Netflix links the home to the account owner’s main TV. If Hulu does the same, you may not be able to watch Hulu on your TV from another location unless you connect a separate portable device to that TV.
Again, this is all speculation until we know exactly how Hulu plans to enforce these rules. Heck, maybe they’ll just go with the honor system!