Peacock Will Now ‘Analyze’ Your Account to Prevent Password Sharing

If you’ve been sharing a Peacock account, get ready for the big crackdown. According to new Terms of Service released today, Peacock will get more aggressive about password sharing. In fact, they say that they may analyze your account usage and drop penalties against you if they think you’re breaking the rules.

Here’s the relevant section:

1.6. Account Sharing. The Peacock Service and any Content accessible through it are for your personal, non-commercial use only. You agree not to use the Peacock Service for public or commercial performances of any kind. Unless otherwise permitted by your Service Tier, you may not share your subscription outside of your household. “Household” means the collection of devices associated with your primary personal residence. Additional usage rules may apply to certain Service Tiers. For more details on our account sharing policy, please visit our Help Center. We may, in our sole discretion, analyze the use of your account to determine compliance with these provisions. If we determine, in our sole discretion, that you have violated these Terms of Service, we may limit, suspend or terminate access to the Peacock Service or take any other steps permitted by these Terms of Service (including those set forth in Section 5.3 below). You are solely responsible for all use of your account, including the use of your account by other members of your household.

These kinds of account-sharing warnings are nothing new. Most streaming services discourage the practice, if not forbid it entirely. This language from Peacock does seem abnormally aggressive, however.

Peacock has been throwing its weight around in recent months after securing the NBA and making the platform a must-have destination for basketball fans. As part of the sports acquisition, the service raised its prices in July. It also added a very limited tier called Peacock Select for $7.99.

Peacock has been stuck at 41 million subscribers for 9 months. The hope is that the NBA will be such a draw, it may offset people who quit over the higher prices. A password-sharing crackdown at Netflix resulted in a new surge of subscribers. Maybe Peacock is hoping for the same thing.

Peacock’s parent company is said to be one of the final bidders for the much-coveted Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio. If Comcast does indeed grab the movie studio and its linear channels, the more aggressive account-sharing ban makes sense. Such a deal wouldn’t come cheap and they wouldn’t want any new library additions shared with your old roommates.

NBCUniversal has also been rearranging its portfolio, working to spin off the bulk of their linear cable channels to a new company called Versant. As part of that move, all the helpful content from MSNBC and CNBC left Peacock.

Will Peacock actually follow through and punish users who share passwords? It seems unlikely, but maybe the threat is enough to deter people. We’ll see how strict they are about the crackdown as this policy rolls out.

I’ve used Peacock on and off since its launch and I think it’s a mostly lousy platform with a poor library and clunky navigation.

As a former NBCUniversal employee myself, I can tell you it’s not the most nimble organization. Peacock won’t truly fly until the corporate bosses step aside and let the creatives take the lead. This is a platform that thought it would pull in viewers with reboots of “Punky Brewster” and “Saved by the Bell” and sad spin-offs like “The Kids Tonight Show” and “Vanderpump Dogs.”

If you shared your password with me, I wouldn’t bother typing it in to watch that slop.