Can You Share Discovery Plus Subscription With Friends and Family?

When cool new streaming services are launched, there's always the question of whether or not they allow people to share their accounts with others. So, let's see if you can share your Discovery Plus subscription with friends and family.

After a little bit of digging through Discovery Plus's privacy documentation, we found exactly what we thought we would - the service tells you that you need to keep your password to yourself.

This is something that you'll see on all streaming services and so on. It's also something that makes perfect sense because you need to keep this type of things private if you don't want to suffer through account takeovers and so on.

On the other hand, the service allows users to watch content on up to four simultaneous streams. Whether that means two smart TVs, a laptop, and a smartphone, that's all up to you. You are allowed to watch content on so many devices - and even more can be associated with the account. Furthermore, you can create up to five different profiles on Discovery Plus.

That being said, while the terms of the service may not allow you to share your credentials with others, there's certainly enough room to do that. Let's be real - no one uses four simultaneous streams to watch Discovery Plus in the same household.

You Can, But You Shouldn't

What we do advise you to do, however, is to stick to the recommendations from Discovery Plus and don't share your account with anyone else. And that's mostly because of the security shortcomings of the platform itself.

First of all, when you set up profiles for anyone watching content on the service, you'll notice that none of the profiles has admin powers. None of them is the "main" one. Instead, all of them are created equal.

The problem with this situation is that anyone with access to your account can delete any profiles, yours included. When you delete a profile, the watchlist, the history of what's been watched, and so on goes with it.

Another problem is that everyone has the right to modify your account details. That means if you share your account with your cousins, the next time you annoy them, they could end up changing your password and logging you out of the service on your device by removing the device from the list.

None of these things requires any additional code or security measure. Anyone from any of the profiles can change the password by simply filling in the current one and then the new one twice. The changes require no code sent over email, and no notification is sent to the email account to inform of the change.

Also, no extra steps are required to remove devices from an account. Basically, you can realize you've been logged out of the account mid-stream. Thankfully, these things can be reversed by the account holder. The email address associated with the Discovery Plus account cannot be changed without access to the email account itself, as a one-time-code will be generated.

That being said, you can reset the password from the login screen by saying you've forgotten it. This will generate an email sent to your address where you can follow a few steps to reset the password. From there, it's only a matter of time before you log all devices back on again.

However, is this something you want to go through should the person you share your account with decide to lock you out?

We know you're going to do whatever you want and still share your account, but at least be careful who you're sharing it with.