Disney Raising Prices Days After Confirming Ads Will Now Show Up on Every Tier

I've already been pausing subscriptions left and right as my trends have been focusing on one platform's content that I'm not even using the others that I'm paying for that month. After dumping Prime, I eventually dumped Disney+/Hulu bundle for being the most expensive. I then got yet another notice from Netflix for increase rates which was already paused so I just went ahead and canceled it as well.

I wonder how much physical media I could acquire if I was to spend the same money that is not being spent on streaming platforms. I bet within a year, I could build up a pretty decent back catalog from used and $5 bins.

Using CheapCharts and buying Movies and TV on iTunes. Yes you don't "own it" and yes there are the rare occasional license revocations but it's not often enough for me to care about that--They still remain in your library anyways.

I have been diligently collecting quality, fun, and beloved movies over the past 2 years when they go on sale. That or buying bundles when they go on sale. I've amassed a solid collection of quality media, a lot of which is not on any streaming platform. I even have a lot of Disney titles as well!

I can watch it wherever, whenever and I can download it to devices.

Eat your heart out Disney, Netflix, etc...

Which of course is why physical media will increasingly rarely be offered as an option going forward

If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.

The hardest part was figuring out the folder where to save the media on the Ubuntu and give Jeyyfin read permissions on that folder via some Linux commands. It was not that hard because Jellyfin tips and tricks are all over the internet (Reddit for example.)

I was paying for Netflix, but through a thousand cuts they pushed me away from streaming platforms entirely. I probably spend more on hard drives now than I would have with streaming subscriptions, but it's an infinitely better service.

My two favourite apps are Sonarr and Radarr. They make the collection process seamless.

Physical media is being done away with, both discs and players.

Seems like streaming is the future we are going to be fed.

You can only win by unsubscribing.

I suppose at some point you will have to have your device's camera on to confirm you really are interacting with the ads, but currently I can get stuff done during the ads by being in another window.

I haven't seen a television ad since before 2001 or so, unless you count the muted ones at the Mexican restaurant out of the corner of my eye. I'm not sure why anyone ever watches those. Subscription services are inferior to self-hosted streaming.

I wonder if we could regulate a requirement that service providers that serve ads must

1. offer "remove ads" as its own standalone/unbundled thing-you-can-pay-for in relation to any given product or service they offer

2. have at least one SKU of "remove ads" that isn't a subscription, but rather a one-time lifetime purchase, costed at at most the fair-market-value-set projected LTV of the profit they'd make from ads being served to an average user across said average user's lifetime use of the product/service

3. and where these "remove ads" payables must use wording that ties them to a very specific and regulatorily-defined contractual-relationship structure, where the contract cannot have a unilateral change-in-terms clause ("the terms of this contract may be changed at any time" etc); cannot have an arbitration clause (so while you might not be able to sue for product performance, you must be empowered to sue if the company ever again shows you an ad during use of said product); must have a successors-and-assigns clause (so buyouts don't void the contract, but rather obligate the buyer to now execute it on the company's behalf); etc.

4. and where the company is not allowed to factor in whether you have an active "no ads" benefit in calculating dynamic pricing for other offerings (i.e. they can't crank up the prices of their "with ads" product plans for "no ads" purchasers, because then they'd just hide the increasing cost of "no ads" inside the plan cost, effectively making "ad plan where you actually watch ads" and "ad plan where you don't watch ads because of your benefit" into two different SKUs, mooting the unbundling of "no ads".)

With such a regulation in place, companies could always increase the costs of their actual product plans and make them more expensive; and could still continue to bundle "remove ads" as a perk of some plans (slowly slipping upward through pricing tiers as it does today); but they'd be stuck serving anyone who buys a "remove ads" one-time purchase, the same way that those airlines that once offered "lifetime flights" as a limited giveaway were then stuck serving those customers.

I did cancel Disney+, For the cost of 4 movie purchases or a series a month basically.

I thought about Jellyfin, but it was worth the convenience cost to get them easily viewable.

Movies Anywhere helps because i just buy them wherever they are on sale and watch in 1 place.

www.hanaplay.tv

1. Buy a Mac Mini (actually the hardest part given shortages).

2. Download Jellyfin. Drag and drop it into your applications dir.

3. Point it at your downloads dir.

4. Install Jellyfin on your Android TV/whatever.

Yeah, I've done more to it than that (I'm on HN after all), but for people used to torrenting there's nothing here that would present much of a challenge.

Physical media is only cheaper if the user is ok with re-watching the same videos repeatedly. The higher cost of the DVD/Blu-ray discs can be amortized over multiple repeat viewings. (Good example is a 5-year old kid wanting to re-watch Frozen or Shrek cartoons again for the 100th time. A DVD player is cheaper than a Disney+ subscription in that scenario.)

Digital streaming subscriptions are cheaper if the user almost always prefers watching new shows instead of re-runs. That's the viewing habit of the vast majority of subscribers. Trying to only buy physical media to get a constant diet of new shows -- even buying the cheaper used discs from thrift stores -- will cost more than a subscription. Also, the physical discs are not immediately playable on an iPad/smartphone so requires extra hassle of ripping/transcoding that most normies don't want to do. Also, buying harddrives for the NAS server to store the rips isn't cheap either.

I'm all too aware of people preferring brand new shows because I've ripped several hundred DVDs to a stack of terabyte harddrives that nobody ever watches. Instead, they'd rather see what's new on Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ ...

EDIT to add an update of a previous comment about my friend's defiance against ads added to Amazon Prime Videos by borrowing DVDs from the public library. She lost that battle because she finished all the DVDs she wanted to watch so had to go back to Amazon Videos for new content. She now endures the Amazon's ads. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42388626

She really tried to fight ads by avoiding the platform but couldn't sustain it because she ran out of free DVDs to checkout from the library. This means buying DVDs to get something new to watch if trying to stick with physical media and unfortunately, that costs more than streaming platforms. She deals with the ad interruptions by multitasking on an iPad when they come on.

1. Rent/stream your MSM

2. Buy hard copies of your MSM and digitize

3. Pirate MSM

4. Realize that MSM is hot garbage and stop ingesting it

Unless you just, you know, don't watch. Which is what I do. I ask myself, is it even worth all this hassle to watch this stuff? Is it that good? And for me, the answer is, no, it isn't. I can find better things to do with my time. So I do.

When I see ads for things on YouTube, I automatically assume it's a scam... Because it almost always is!

They work because you are infinity percent more likely to buy something you know exists vs something you don't know exists.

Giving up TV is no different from giving up reading literature, or listening to music, or whatever artistic experience you want to have.

Watching a TV show like Adolescence is no different from reading great literature. And fortunately, there's so much great TV from the past couple of decades, you don't ever have to watch bad or brainrot TV if you don't want to.

There's nothing noble about trying to abstain from that.

And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.

It's always the feeds themselves that get you.

I still watch YT Shorts about series and news. That is pretty much TV.

In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.

> ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499

How are these reconciled?

Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.

We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases

OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.

Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.

> We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content.

Emphasis on "before/after playback of Content" and live etc. So they are opening the door for ads everywhere, not just on live TV or Hulu.

This is pedantic. If folk can't see that this is a slow roll towards rolling out the same thing in the US eventually, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Anyone motivated to do this for a smaller group would rather just run a private tracker. The overheads are enormous when you’re not negotiating in bulk.

But then if I pay them for really no ads, like for realzies, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.

So I pay them for really no ads, pinkie swear this time, then ... I'm an even more valuable target! And there's a dollar value for that.

I cannot possibly be of infinite value to these companies.

I am entirely willing to spend money and I have decent savings. I just expect the products put on offer to be worth buying.

There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.

We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.

This implies that "Disney+ Standard With Ads" DOES have ad breaks. The other plans could force you to watch ads before your movie starts.

It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"

Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.

Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.

"If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" -Cory Doctorow

And I wish I was being dramatic here, but truly anytime I feel I've wrapped my head around the depravity of man I just remember that we have "paid" tiers of TV that show ads and I sleep soundly knowing the bottom remains unfathomed.

I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.

... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.

"'Unmissable TV' to be enforced by law"

I just recently dropped Disney+ and Hulu from my ESPN unlimited subscription because the promo price ended and Disney/ESPN failed to send out a reminder email that the price was increasing. At least SiriusXM has the decency to send out a reminder email for the subscription increasing in price so you can go haggle a lower price.

Recently my partner was once again interested in watching something on netflix so instead i signed up for the cheapest 1080p ad-supported tier for $8 or thereabouts. I don't really watch it, and she won't miss the quality. If the ads don't bother her, so be it. If they do, we'll just stop watching paying for netflix again!

The lesson I've learned, the same as I learned from Facebook, is "Never sign up to another service ever again". It's much easier to just never sign up than it is to convince the entire family that you should cancel something.

The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.

I do agree though. It seems like pretty bad behavior to charge 20 dollars AND insisting on showering us with ads.

The more I learn Swedish, the less ignorant I become to the advertising and "gotcha" headlines on newspapers and stickers and such; and I'm noticing its outsized (negative) effect.

I know those elements are super common in English, but it seems dialed up to 11 in the other language. I wonder if it's basically the same in English, I'm just so used to it that it doesn't seem as fake.

If you know of safe pirating sites that have good bandwidth and uptime, that's great! But lots of consumers aren't willing to go through ones with quetsionable ads, or fight the need to new ones bimonthly as the streaming sites churn like a game of whackamole.

So if you've got that hookup and know where to find them, the convenience exists for you, its easy and useful. For someone wanting to get into it, it might not be so convenient.

They've now even made a TV show about Darth Maul (Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord) during the Galactic Empire period. This is just beyond ridiculous. This is just rubbing salt into the wound and saying: "We can do anything we want, no matter how stupid or illogical. You'll eat shit and you'll like it!"

I'll never get over Darth Maul's return. I'll detest Star Wars for the rest of my life just because of this. The person that came up with it (Dave Filoni?) should be fired.

Then I pay for a subscription for a tool to remind me to cancel subscriptions and forget to cancel that one too.

If you block a single domain at the DNS level you never see those ads either.

The line doesn't exists. It's most profitable for the company to repeatedly:

1. Have an ad-supported tier and a no-ads tier

2. Wait for most people to move to the no-ads tier

3. Introduce ads into the no-ads tier

4. Wait for people to get sick of ads

5. Introduce a new, higher cost no ads tier

There is no threshold where it's more profitable for the company to never introduce ads at that price point.

This is why people go scorched earth with adblockers. There’s a lot of discussion about “good” ad networks being allowlisted, but they are all just one missed earnings report away from implementing dark patterns. None of them are trustworthy.

This is just how not having antitrust, media ownership limitations, or consumer protections works. The actors, crew, and production companies are in the same boat as you when dealing with Disney.

I know that they are probably going to roll out remote attestation at some point, but I cancelled YouTube Premium the last time they did an insane price raise.