People, Not Packets — The Hardest Part Is Identity & Profiles
When HBO Max became “Max” in May 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery promised a “seamless transition” for users. Instead, Twitter exploded with complaints: login failures, apps that crashed mid-show, watchlists that lost their alphabetical sorting, and recommendation engines that suddenly felt foreign. One user tweeted, “My critique of the new streaming Max now that the switchover from HBO Max has occurred: Needs improvement.”
The irony was that this wasn’t even a true consolidation—it was just a rebrand of a single service. WBD was preparing for an eventual merger with Discovery+ that was first announced in 2022. Three years later, Discovery+ still operates as a separate service, creating the expensive dual-platform operation that consolidation was supposed to eliminate.
Meanwhile, Disney’s integration of Hulu content into Disney+ began in 2024 with promises of unified access. Users instead report authentication problems including “error code 83” that prevents access to content they’ve paid for. The timeline has stretched from 2025 to 2026, with live TV functionality requiring a partnership with Fubo rather than direct integration. Even Disney, with virtually unlimited resources, struggles with identity consolidation across platforms they already own.
The technical infrastructure worked fine in both cases. The video files played. The content delivery networks hummed along. But users felt displaced—like strangers in their own streaming services. That displacement captures why identity migration is where consolidation dreams go to die.
The Human Cost of Getting Identity Wrong
Moving user profiles isn’t a technical problem that can be solved with better algorithms or faster servers. It’s a trust problem that touches the most personal aspects of how people interact with technology. Your streaming profile contains years of viewing history, carefully curated watchlists, family settings that protect your kids, and recommendation models that understand your taste better than your closest friends.
Get the migration wrong and users don’t just complain—they abandon ship entirely. Disney’s ongoing Hulu integration, which began with grand promises in 2024 and now extends through 2026, demonstrates why even well-resourced companies struggle with identity consolidation. Users report authentication errors, login confusion between services, and the dreaded “error code 83” that prevents access to content they’ve already paid for.
The stakes become visceral when you consider what actually breaks:
Digital identity fragmentation. Users exist as email addresses, phone numbers, social sign-ons from Apple and Google, wholesale subscriber IDs from Amazon Prime Channels and Roku, and device-only accounts that never touched an email. Connecting these fragments without accidentally merging different households requires surgical precision that automation can’t provide.
Recommendation apocalypse. When Funimation merged into Crunchyroll in 2024, anime fans didn’t just lose access to shows—they lost the recommendation engines that had learned their preferences over years of viewing. Starting over with generic suggestions makes a service feel broken regardless of how much content it offers.
Family chaos. Kids’ profiles mixed with adult content, parental controls that reset to default, shared household accounts that accidentally merge across breakups or roommate changes. These aren’t edge cases—they’re the everyday realities of how families actually use streaming services.
Why Technical Solutions Miss the Point
The cautious integration school focuses on technical complexity: content ID mapping, DRM alignment, device certification. But the real complexity is human behavior interacting with imperfect systems.
Consider what happened during the HBO Max rebrand. The underlying streaming technology worked perfectly. Users could still watch shows. But they lost features like alphabetical watchlist sorting that had become muscle memory. The app icon changed from purple to blue, making it “lost in a sea of identical icons” on users’ devices. Recommendation quality degraded as algorithms reset.
Warner Bros. Discovery characterized these as “minor issues” that were “quickly remedied.” Users experienced them as fundamental breaks in their relationship with the service. The technical problems were solvable; the trust problems lingered for months.
The Identity Migration Playbook That Actually Works
Real-world failures teach specific lessons about what works and what destroys user trust:
Start with deterministic connections, never probabilistic ones
Build identity graphs using verified signals: email addresses, phone numbers, payment fingerprints, social sign-on subjects. Maintain confidence scores and data provenance so every connection can be audited or reversed.
The cardinal rule: never auto-merge households based on shared devices or similar names. The customer service disasters from accidentally combining divorced parents’ profiles or merging different families’ viewing histories create permanent brand damage.
Preserve what users can see and control
Users notice interface changes before they notice technical improvements. The HBO Max experience degraded when familiar features disappeared—alphabetical sorting, consistent icon colors, predictable navigation patterns.
Successful migrations preserve visible user state: profile names, avatars, kids flags, language preferences, accessibility settings. They maintain watchlist organization, continue-watching progress, and user ratings across the entire catalog.
Handle catalog mismatches with user agency
The same show often has different IDs, season numbering, or content editions across services. Rather than guessing which version maps to which, surface ambiguous cases in a “Need your choice” queue that users can resolve with a single tap.
This prevents the Funimation-Crunchyroll problem where users lost access to specific editions or versions of shows they’d been watching, with no clear path to recovery.
Seed personalization to prevent cold starts
Export user preference vectors—top genres, favorite creators, viewing patterns—and train adapter models to project those preferences into the destination service’s recommendation space. Blend seeded preferences with popularity signals for the first several viewing sessions.
The goal is making recommendations feel familiar immediately rather than starting from zero. Users who feel like the service “doesn’t know them anymore” often cancel within the first week.
Build transparent user controls
Provide preview screens before any irreversible merges. Show exactly what will carry over, what won’t, and why. Offer prominent undo capabilities for 30 days with full data rollback.
Most importantly: require step-up authentication and explicit approval for any action that combines viewing history across different user accounts.
The Technical Reality Behind User Experience
Identity migration looks like a people problem, but it has specific technical implementations that determine success or failure:
Consent and privacy compliance. GDPR, CCPA, and children’s privacy laws create different legal bases for data processing across regions. Successfully migrating consent requires mapping legal purposes across jurisdictions—personalization, analytics, marketing—and triggering fresh consent only where legally required.
Entitlement decoupling. Separate “who you are” from “what you paid for.” Wholesale billing relationships with Amazon, Roku, and Apple often can’t transfer seamlessly, requiring claim tokens and automatic credits tied to billing cycles rather than forced account migrations.
Content crosswalks. Create standard content mappings using industry identifiers like EIDR and ISAN, plus internal title databases that handle director’s cuts, regional edits, and season renumbering. The goal is preserving user context—where they were in a show, how they rated it—across different content versions.
Replay-safe data pipelines. Use event-driven architectures that can safely re-run migrations without double-applying changes. Failure modes during large-scale profile moves often involve duplicate entries, lost associations, or partial migrations that leave users in inconsistent states.
Success Metrics That Matter
Identity migration succeeds when users feel at home immediately, not when technical benchmarks are met:
- Profile preservation above 95% of active profiles with complete metadata
- Watch-state continuity above 90% for titles with precise content mapping
- Collection carry-over above 95% for watchlists and user-created lists
- Recommendation familiarity within 5% of baseline click-through rates in the first week
- User satisfaction that meets or exceeds pre-migration levels
Most importantly: merge error reports below 0.2% of migrating accounts. Higher error rates indicate systematic problems with household detection or consent handling that require immediate remediation.
The Organizational Challenge
Technical implementation is only half the battle. The other half is organizational discipline around user communication and support scaling.
Pre-migration communication must explain exactly what will transfer, what won’t, and how users can maintain control. The Disney-Hulu integration suffers from unclear messaging about which features will be available when, leaving users confused about service capabilities.
Customer support surge capacity during migration periods requires specialized training on identity linking, profile merging, and data recovery. Generic support scripts can’t handle the edge cases that emerge when millions of accounts move simultaneously.
Executive accountability for user experience metrics, not just technical completion milestones. The HBO Max rebrand succeeded technically but failed experientially because leadership treated user interface changes as minor details rather than core product decisions.
Real Stakes, Real Consequences
Identity migration determines whether consolidation creates competitive advantage or destroys user loyalty. Netflix doesn’t just win because of content investment—it wins because users never have to think about which service has their shows or whether their recommendations make sense.
HBO Max and Paramount+ can build that unified experience, but only if they treat profile migration as the most critical workstream in the entire consolidation. Get the technical infrastructure perfect and users will still leave if they don’t feel at home. Get the user experience right and they’ll forgive minor technical hiccups.
The choice isn’t between fast and careful—it’s between building user trust systematically or watching millions of subscribers slowly abandon services that no longer feel like theirs.
Next: “From Stacks to Stack — App Layer, Ads, FAST & Live” (Next Tuesday) examines why technical complexity concerns are overstated when platforms share common foundations.