10 ms·

Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions

473 points by DeepLogin 6d ago

deleted 6d ago
[deleted]
ljf 6d ago
When we first got Disney + it was a winner in our house, then kids loved what they could watch, there was good family viewing too, and then was a few good shows that my wife and I were interested. Lately, it has been right down our list. I think my daughter still watches it on occasion, but nothing of note that I want to watch. If we didn't get it for free with our bank account, I'd cancel it. And with adverts, I'd be cancelling in a heartbeat. Juggling subscriptions has become really expensive lately - but the only one I value is Netflix, but even then I don't feel I get great value from it, we seem to watch far less TV or films this year.
- basisword 6d ago
  I recently switched to the Netflix sub with ads. Totally worth it. The non-ads packages are ridiculously expensive now and the ads they show are few and far between.
  - hustlejuice 6d ago
    long time Netflix user, my experience using Netflix with ads is the opposite. I find watching anything on Netflix unbearable due to frequent ads. I’m about to pull the plug
    - basisword 6d ago
      I wonder if they're AB testing? I think I got 2-3 ad breaks over an hour and each was just two 30sec ads.
      - leipert 6d ago
        I don’t have enough spare time to waste 5% of “content time” for ads.
- le-mark 6d ago
  Same, we had it for about a year, watched everything we wanted. Then after all the missteps they did to dilute the Star Wars franchise we dropped it.
- tehwebguy 6d ago
  Always cancel immediately after you sign up. Treat all streamers as one-month-at-a-time purchases and you’ll realize how much you’ve been paying for that you weren’t using.
- lennartb 6d ago
  The only "streaming service" we really use consistently anymore is Youtube.
cynicalsecurity 6d ago
Meanwhile pirates don't see any ads. Make this make sense.
- chrisstu 6d ago
  [flagged]
  - rwmj 6d ago
    Cash is rivalrous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
    - chrisstu 6d ago
      A fancy word, presumably used in this context in an attempt to make the argument that stealing copyright material has no negative consequences.
  - Daneel_ 6d ago
    Taking the cash from a bank deprives others of the money. Duplicating a video doesn’t deprive another person of anything. Piracy is simple: when you make your product more convenient than piracy, people use it. Steam is popular for a reason - no crap, enormous game selection.. it’s just better than pirating. Netflix used to be the same - great selection, no ads.. now look: terrible selection and price is too high.
    - Brendinooo 6d ago
      If a production crew of 1000 people makes a movie and everyone pirates it, you don't think those people will be deprived of anything?
      - mitxela 6d ago
        The production crew is getting peanuts anyway. If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead. Also maybe it's their job to come up with a business model that everyone doesn't hate. If they'd just syndicate to all streaming platforms, piracy wouldn't be a problem for them.
lordleft 6d ago
Something I really dislike about modern consumer products is that companies simply don’t care if their decisions leave their customers embittered and feeling negatively about their decisions. It seems like that used to be a salient factor in how firms designed, sold and pitched their wares.
- laughing_man 6d ago
  They've done the calculation. They'll lose X income because of subscribers who leave, and they'll get Y extra income from the ones who remain. If X < Y then implement policy.
  - usrbinbash 6d ago
    Companies increasingly no longer even care about income. They care about what boosts investor confidence. So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.
    - scotty79 6d ago
      It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".
      - mrguyorama 6d ago
        It's simpler than that. To a public company, the product is the stock price, and the customers are investors. Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.
    - koe123 6d ago
      The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.
jamesnorden 6d ago
They're turning streaming into regular TV again, absolute nonsense.
- DarkNova6 6d ago
  It's like paying for cable back in the day but you also get ads. The sheer audacity they think they can get away with because they consider themselves having a monopoly.
  - WesolyKubeczek 6d ago
    Back when I had cable it was all like 15 minutes of content blocks separated by 30-minute blocks of ad. Because fuck me, I guess.
  - throwaway85825 6d ago
    They have a government granted temporary monopoly.
    - mitxela 6d ago
      Permanent monopoly, because you'll always be watching what's current today, not 70 years ago
      - jl6 6d ago
        Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?
        mahboi 6d ago
        buy DVDs I guess
  - ymolodtsov 6d ago
    Except you can cancel it from the next month with a few clicks.
semiquaver 6d ago
Did anyone actually read the linked wiki in full? It’s basically saying “if there are embedded ads in certain live (likely sports) content we carry you may see them even on an ad-free plan because we don’t have an alternative. Also we might try to promote different tiers of Disney+ itself within the app so to the extent you see that as an ad, that’s an exception to ‘ad-free’” I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.
- shakna 6d ago
  This is the same terms of service that were stretched to indemnify against theme park accidents. [0] Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt? [0] https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled-in-terms-disney-clause-a-wrongful-death-lawsuit-and-bad-pr https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled...
  - echelon 6d ago
    Your link doesn't appear to work for me. In case folks aren't aware, Disney tried to avoid an allergy-related wrongful death lawsuit from a restaurant at Disney Springs (large publicly available outdoor mall that doesn't even require tickets) because a couple had a Disney+ streaming trial: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go
    - gruez 6d ago
      The original lawsuit was spurious to begin with because the restaurant wasn't even operated by Disney.
      - oivey 6d ago
        Incredibly irrelevant. By asserting their ToS this way, they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.
jonathanlydall 6d ago
In South Africa (and I imagine other countries) they're currently force migrating subscribers over to a "new" app (at least on iOS and tvOS) and your profiles with their respective watchlists is left behind in the old app, no way to migrate / import it into the new one. This isn't even mentioned on their FAQ for the process. A absolutely terrible user experience. On the bright side the "new" app (which I assume is actually the same as used in the US) seems to not have the following annoying issues of the old one: - It was impossible to enable auto play on a "kids" profile. As my kids can't use a remote yet I had their profile set to "adult". - An episode would never be marked as "fully" watched, but this wasn't just a mild annoyance, it would "break" autoplay when re-watching a series because when it started auto playing a next episode which was previously watched, it would "continue" from where you had watched upto (minus about 30 seconds). This results in it cycling through the last 30 seconds of every episode of a show. The easiest way around this I found was to make a new profile every now and again for the kids.
- mitxela 6d ago
  I've worked for one of these companies as it rolled out a new app. Surprisingly, it didn't seem malicious. It was just platform/framework churn + "we need to unify all these apps into one common codebase"
  - jonathanlydall 6d ago
    I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about. It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.
- barbazoo 6d ago
  Funny, autoplay functionality is exactly why I don't let my kid watch those.
oybng 6d ago
Stop. Giving. Them. Your. Money.
raffraffraff 6d ago
I love this use of the word "agreement"
- deleted 6d ago
  [deleted]
voganmother42 6d ago
Disney, after having completely failed to appeal to the next generation, needs to extract as much revenue as they can now
Alifatisk 6d ago
Why am I even paying anymore.
- alt227 6d ago
  Because you are a good little consumer.
matheusmoreira 6d ago
It literally never fails. If you pay to avoid ads, you are merely letting them know that you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff. You're doing their job for them by segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market. At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to show up and notice how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those people full of disposable income.
- mahboi 6d ago
  Consumers do seem less willing to waste time watching ads than before, though. Cable TV was insane.
- MarkWayneNewton 6d ago
  The seas are always open, friend.
- carlosjobim 6d ago
  You can cancel a subscription. That's how subscriptions work. That means that any future changes is not a concern for current offerings. And I can't understand why hackers never acknowledge this. I can put gas in the tank of my car. In the future, they might lower the quality of the gas - or even make it more expensive! That doesn't change anything about the gas that I will currently put in my car. > you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff Advertisers already know that a hundred percent of the population have $20 in disposable monthly income, because they can pay with credit. So they don't learn anything new.
  - wright08 6d ago
    I am morbidly curious of your definition of 'the population', could you elaborate?
    - carlosjobim 5d ago
      So you don't die: The population in the regions where these subscriptions are offered. Every region where a streaming subscription costs $20 per month, 100% of the population has $20 in disposable income per month whether they actually have the money or not, because credit is offered for consumption. Every region where a streaming subscription costs $5 per month, 100% of the population has $5 in disposable income per month for the same reason. The original argument I responded to, is a typical hacker trope and of logical fallacy that gets repeated infinitely. It goes like this: "Just because somebody spent $10 or $20 on something which I would never want to buy, means they must be extremely rich and extremely wasteful with their money. So advertiser are drooling and crawling over each other to get their hands on this cash." If that's the case, then advertisers clearly must also target tattooed people as the most valuable customer group possible, since every tattoo is proof that somebody once had 50 dollars.
ghusto 6d ago
No it doesn't. The changes are intended to cover the ads that are in pre-existing non-removable content. Nothing is changing, they're just making it clear that this is happening (or perhaps more unclear, judging by the response here).
shevy-java 6d ago
That's sad. I do not want my money to go into ads anywhere. I decided that for my own life, I can do well without propaganda, aka ads. I can not kill ads in reallife, e. g. if a poster shows this on some house, but I can most definitely get rid of it on the www, which I do. Ublock origin is the bare minimum (I can also use it via thorium actually, so via the adChrome code base, but I'd love to be able to de-google myself as well - the sooner the better. Sadly I still depend on Google too much, which does not make me happy. Now that Google ruined its search engine, though, I am looking for viable alternatives. The other search engines are really bad though, although I have increasingly noticed that I get different search results, e. g. qwant shows other things than Google, and in some cases better results using the same search query, which was interesting. Sooner or later I can completely abandon the crap that is modern google search).
deleted 6d ago
[deleted]
mosura 6d ago
Disney have/had this amazing strategy diagram https://kottke.org/15/06/walt-disneys-corporate-strategy-chart https://kottke.org/15/06/walt-disneys-corporate-strategy-cha... The thing people fail to appreciate about media empires is there is no ad/not-ad distinction: it is all an ad, either for other products or for more of the same media.
al_borland 6d ago
HBO, on their “ad-free” tier shows ads for their own content before almost everything. I reached out to support about this and they said they don’t count those as ads. These companies are all scum. They shift definitions and make the service worse. I won’t be renewing my subscription to HBO over this (I’m upset I bought a whole year), and I won’t be opting for Disney+ in the future either, as it sounds like they are doing similar things (and more). To me, “no ads” means “no ads”. I’m done with these technical definitions people come up with in board rooms to subvert customer expectations and erode product quality.
wicket 6d ago
The linked wiki focuses on a new user agreement from January 2025. A link to the referenced article might have been more appropriate: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Disney-New-user-agreement-allows-ads-before-movies-in-all-subscriptions-11455127.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Disney-New-user-agreement-allow... As far as I can tell, this new user agreement only applies to Germany, at least for now.
Anoian 6d ago
PSA: Soon german brand AVM will have dns blocking of advertising right in their routers (fritz box). Search the web for Fritz!OS 8.40 if you are interested.
philipallstar 6d ago
Use BBC iPlayer and you will see a lot of ads. Just for BBC content.
- dwedge 6d ago
  Use BBC from abroad and you see scam ads and the "which bar would you move to save the king" crap. They're not morally above this, only legally within the UK
huxflux 6d ago
Bye bye Disney!
oldsklgdfth 6d ago
Working in video ads has validated that I basically never pay for video or music services. 90% of dev time is spent optimizing the monetization path while the playback path needs to be good enough. Anecdotally, appleTV never remembers which episode I was watching or the timestamp in the episode. I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV. That said, IMO this is the only business model for streaming companies and content owners to see bucketloads of money, so it sticks. Also, free tier makes for easy entry. But I would gladly pay $10/month for a seamless streaming experience (app and playback) where I just select a couple of titles at a time. Similar to the mail version of netflix, but without snail mail. At this point, streaming a known catalog is a text-book system, albeit expensive in terms of distro and bandwidth.
- tehwebguy 6d ago
  > I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV. That’s what all cable news, reality TV, game shows and sports channels are!
  - alt227 6d ago
    These days I feel like I get much better value paying for cable with hundreds of channels than I do any streaming service.
  - oldsklgdfth 5d ago
    In my experience, I'm usually revising TV shows and movies that I enjoy. Say I want to rewatch the office or snatch. I just don't have the patience for the dongle to wake up and refresh all the banner ads, then the app to load, then get ads. I should appreciate how far technology has come that a tiny computer is running off 10W to connect to the internet to watch and listen to anything I can imagine. But in that moment, I just want it to work as smoothly as turning on a dvd player.
OrvalWintermute 6d ago
This has the potential to seriously hurt their subscription model business
ChrisArchitect 6d ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769395
deleted 6d ago
[deleted]
GreenLightGo 6d ago
Advertising is getting more unbearable and disgusting every day. Does advertising actually attract anyone anymore? It just pushes people away...
zackmorris 6d ago
Ads are money laundering. Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No. Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.
- Fergusonb 6d ago
  "zip it cookie"
joshtronic 6d ago
Why aren’t we raging at movie theaters? They’ve been putting ads before the content we actually paid to see for a long time now
- leipert 6d ago
  At the movies I can grab popcorn while the ads play. And usually the ads are for other movies, often enough topical. Watching an action movie, get ads for more action movies. If ads are playing on the TV, they inject themselves into your home. Especially kids now wanting to buy or watch that you didn’t get to vet.
- GuinansEyebrows 6d ago
  i don't think i've ever seen a discussion about movie theaters online where people weren't complaining about preroll ads, going back a good 20 years when this started to happen :)
leipert 6d ago
And I literally cannot log in to cancel my subscription. Caught in some redirect loop.
vachina 6d ago
You guys are paying for Disney+?
lenerdenator 6d ago
Remember: Cable TV started out as ad-free. I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free. Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.
plazmatic 6d ago
[dead]
whatever1 6d ago
Also all of the subscription services now have such draconian IP checks, that the false positives for password sharing have become super annoying. Every time I have to prove that I am me. Literally netflix, disney+, nytimes have become so annoying to use that I had to cancel.
koe123 6d ago
Pirating is so back
Melatonic 6d ago
Didn't they originally say there would be no ads on Disney+ ? Now they're one of the worst. Hard to watch anything on there. When the alternatives are free and a better product (no ads and easier to use) it seems odd to expect people to pay for something less convenient.
- mahboi 6d ago
  Because some people really want to watch some particular show. If so then good for them, idc what Disney does.
pendenthistory 6d ago
Lol, no thanks. I'm back to piratebay.
alienbaby 6d ago
Really, people don't pay for 'ad free' .. rather, they do, but what they really want is 'interruption free', which I think is why Disney+ promoting their own content as part a stream is essentially perceived as an 'ad'. I personally think it should be considerd an ad regardless of it being your own content or not. I don't care if it's someone else's , or your content, it's an advert for that content.
- mahboi 6d ago
  Reminds me of the old Disney Channel that had tons of self-ads on it
tsylba 6d ago
The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.). Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition. A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.
- deleted 6d ago
  [deleted]
ricardobeat 6d ago
They increased yearly subscription just two months ago, from €139 to €159. Those €20 alone should pay for the ads. And Disney+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all, while providing very limited content. This is completely out of touch.
- happyopossum 6d ago
  > Disney+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all A cursory search found that the first 3 subs I checked were the same cost or more than disney+ (HBO Max, Fox One, and Netflix)
happyopossum 6d ago
> January 27, 2025 So, not new. Got it
hsuduebc2 6d ago
There is no other reason to use this apps other than convenience which is keep getting smaller and pricier.
wigster 6d ago
I bailed on disney when they went Trump and stopped Jimmy Kimmel Live! Have not missed it.
danbrooks 6d ago
Not sure this is as nefarious as it might look at first glance. Disney+ supports a variety of content types - some of which naturally have ads. A big example is the Super Bowl (coming in February), which has always had ads.

473 points by DeepLogin 6d ago

deleted 6d ago

[deleted]

ljf 6d ago

When we first got Disney + it was a winner in our house, then kids loved what they could watch, there was good family viewing too, and then was a few good shows that my wife and I were interested. Lately, it has been right down our list. I think my daughter still watches it on occasion, but nothing of note that I want to watch. If we didn't get it for free with our bank account, I'd cancel it. And with adverts, I'd be cancelling in a heartbeat. Juggling subscriptions has become really expensive lately - but the only one I value is Netflix, but even then I don't feel I get great value from it, we seem to watch far less TV or films this year.

basisword 6d ago
I recently switched to the Netflix sub with ads. Totally worth it. The non-ads packages are ridiculously expensive now and the ads they show are few and far between.
- hustlejuice 6d ago
  long time Netflix user, my experience using Netflix with ads is the opposite. I find watching anything on Netflix unbearable due to frequent ads. I’m about to pull the plug
  - basisword 6d ago
    I wonder if they're AB testing? I think I got 2-3 ad breaks over an hour and each was just two 30sec ads.
    - leipert 6d ago
      I don’t have enough spare time to waste 5% of “content time” for ads.
le-mark 6d ago
Same, we had it for about a year, watched everything we wanted. Then after all the missteps they did to dilute the Star Wars franchise we dropped it.
tehwebguy 6d ago
Always cancel immediately after you sign up. Treat all streamers as one-month-at-a-time purchases and you’ll realize how much you’ve been paying for that you weren’t using.
lennartb 6d ago
The only "streaming service" we really use consistently anymore is Youtube.

cynicalsecurity 6d ago

Meanwhile pirates don't see any ads. Make this make sense.

chrisstu 6d ago
[flagged]
- rwmj 6d ago
  Cash is rivalrous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
  - chrisstu 6d ago
    A fancy word, presumably used in this context in an attempt to make the argument that stealing copyright material has no negative consequences.
- Daneel_ 6d ago
  Taking the cash from a bank deprives others of the money. Duplicating a video doesn’t deprive another person of anything. Piracy is simple: when you make your product more convenient than piracy, people use it. Steam is popular for a reason - no crap, enormous game selection.. it’s just better than pirating. Netflix used to be the same - great selection, no ads.. now look: terrible selection and price is too high.
  - Brendinooo 6d ago
    If a production crew of 1000 people makes a movie and everyone pirates it, you don't think those people will be deprived of anything?
    - mitxela 6d ago
      The production crew is getting peanuts anyway. If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead. Also maybe it's their job to come up with a business model that everyone doesn't hate. If they'd just syndicate to all streaming platforms, piracy wouldn't be a problem for them.

lordleft 6d ago

Something I really dislike about modern consumer products is that companies simply don’t care if their decisions leave their customers embittered and feeling negatively about their decisions. It seems like that used to be a salient factor in how firms designed, sold and pitched their wares.

laughing_man 6d ago
They've done the calculation. They'll lose X income because of subscribers who leave, and they'll get Y extra income from the ones who remain. If X < Y then implement policy.
- usrbinbash 6d ago
  Companies increasingly no longer even care about income. They care about what boosts investor confidence. So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.
  - scotty79 6d ago
    It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".
    - mrguyorama 6d ago
      It's simpler than that. To a public company, the product is the stock price, and the customers are investors. Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.
  - koe123 6d ago
    The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.

jamesnorden 6d ago

They're turning streaming into regular TV again, absolute nonsense.

DarkNova6 6d ago
It's like paying for cable back in the day but you also get ads. The sheer audacity they think they can get away with because they consider themselves having a monopoly.
- WesolyKubeczek 6d ago
  Back when I had cable it was all like 15 minutes of content blocks separated by 30-minute blocks of ad. Because fuck me, I guess.
- throwaway85825 6d ago
  They have a government granted temporary monopoly.
  - mitxela 6d ago
    Permanent monopoly, because you'll always be watching what's current today, not 70 years ago
    - jl6 6d ago
      Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?
      - mahboi 6d ago
        buy DVDs I guess
- ymolodtsov 6d ago
  Except you can cancel it from the next month with a few clicks.

semiquaver 6d ago

Did anyone actually read the linked wiki in full? It’s basically saying “if there are embedded ads in certain live (likely sports) content we carry you may see them even on an ad-free plan because we don’t have an alternative. Also we might try to promote different tiers of Disney+ itself within the app so to the extent you see that as an ad, that’s an exception to ‘ad-free’” I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.

shakna 6d ago
This is the same terms of service that were stretched to indemnify against theme park accidents. [0] Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt? [0] https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled-in-terms-disney-clause-a-wrongful-death-lawsuit-and-bad-pr https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled...
- echelon 6d ago
  Your link doesn't appear to work for me. In case folks aren't aware, Disney tried to avoid an allergy-related wrongful death lawsuit from a restaurant at Disney Springs (large publicly available outdoor mall that doesn't even require tickets) because a couple had a Disney+ streaming trial: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go
  - gruez 6d ago
    The original lawsuit was spurious to begin with because the restaurant wasn't even operated by Disney.
    - oivey 6d ago
      Incredibly irrelevant. By asserting their ToS this way, they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.

jonathanlydall 6d ago

In South Africa (and I imagine other countries) they're currently force migrating subscribers over to a "new" app (at least on iOS and tvOS) and your profiles with their respective watchlists is left behind in the old app, no way to migrate / import it into the new one. This isn't even mentioned on their FAQ for the process. A absolutely terrible user experience. On the bright side the "new" app (which I assume is actually the same as used in the US) seems to not have the following annoying issues of the old one: - It was impossible to enable auto play on a "kids" profile. As my kids can't use a remote yet I had their profile set to "adult". - An episode would never be marked as "fully" watched, but this wasn't just a mild annoyance, it would "break" autoplay when re-watching a series because when it started auto playing a next episode which was previously watched, it would "continue" from where you had watched upto (minus about 30 seconds). This results in it cycling through the last 30 seconds of every episode of a show. The easiest way around this I found was to make a new profile every now and again for the kids.

mitxela 6d ago
I've worked for one of these companies as it rolled out a new app. Surprisingly, it didn't seem malicious. It was just platform/framework churn + "we need to unify all these apps into one common codebase"
- jonathanlydall 6d ago
  I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about. It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.
barbazoo 6d ago
Funny, autoplay functionality is exactly why I don't let my kid watch those.

oybng 6d ago

Stop. Giving. Them. Your. Money.

raffraffraff 6d ago

I love this use of the word "agreement"

deleted 6d ago
[deleted]

voganmother42 6d ago

Disney, after having completely failed to appeal to the next generation, needs to extract as much revenue as they can now

Alifatisk 6d ago

Why am I even paying anymore.

alt227 6d ago
Because you are a good little consumer.

matheusmoreira 6d ago

It literally never fails. If you pay to avoid ads, you are merely letting them know that you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff. You're doing their job for them by segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market. At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to show up and notice how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those people full of disposable income.

mahboi 6d ago
Consumers do seem less willing to waste time watching ads than before, though. Cable TV was insane.
MarkWayneNewton 6d ago
The seas are always open, friend.
carlosjobim 6d ago
You can cancel a subscription. That's how subscriptions work. That means that any future changes is not a concern for current offerings. And I can't understand why hackers never acknowledge this. I can put gas in the tank of my car. In the future, they might lower the quality of the gas - or even make it more expensive! That doesn't change anything about the gas that I will currently put in my car. > you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff Advertisers already know that a hundred percent of the population have $20 in disposable monthly income, because they can pay with credit. So they don't learn anything new.
- wright08 6d ago
  I am morbidly curious of your definition of 'the population', could you elaborate?
  - carlosjobim 5d ago
    So you don't die: The population in the regions where these subscriptions are offered. Every region where a streaming subscription costs $20 per month, 100% of the population has $20 in disposable income per month whether they actually have the money or not, because credit is offered for consumption. Every region where a streaming subscription costs $5 per month, 100% of the population has $5 in disposable income per month for the same reason. The original argument I responded to, is a typical hacker trope and of logical fallacy that gets repeated infinitely. It goes like this: "Just because somebody spent $10 or $20 on something which I would never want to buy, means they must be extremely rich and extremely wasteful with their money. So advertiser are drooling and crawling over each other to get their hands on this cash." If that's the case, then advertisers clearly must also target tattooed people as the most valuable customer group possible, since every tattoo is proof that somebody once had 50 dollars.

ghusto 6d ago

No it doesn't. The changes are intended to cover the ads that are in pre-existing non-removable content. Nothing is changing, they're just making it clear that this is happening (or perhaps more unclear, judging by the response here).

shevy-java 6d ago

That's sad. I do not want my money to go into ads anywhere. I decided that for my own life, I can do well without propaganda, aka ads. I can not kill ads in reallife, e. g. if a poster shows this on some house, but I can most definitely get rid of it on the www, which I do. Ublock origin is the bare minimum (I can also use it via thorium actually, so via the adChrome code base, but I'd love to be able to de-google myself as well - the sooner the better. Sadly I still depend on Google too much, which does not make me happy. Now that Google ruined its search engine, though, I am looking for viable alternatives. The other search engines are really bad though, although I have increasingly noticed that I get different search results, e. g. qwant shows other things than Google, and in some cases better results using the same search query, which was interesting. Sooner or later I can completely abandon the crap that is modern google search).

deleted 6d ago

[deleted]

mosura 6d ago

Disney have/had this amazing strategy diagram https://kottke.org/15/06/walt-disneys-corporate-strategy-chart https://kottke.org/15/06/walt-disneys-corporate-strategy-cha... The thing people fail to appreciate about media empires is there is no ad/not-ad distinction: it is all an ad, either for other products or for more of the same media.

al_borland 6d ago

HBO, on their “ad-free” tier shows ads for their own content before almost everything. I reached out to support about this and they said they don’t count those as ads. These companies are all scum. They shift definitions and make the service worse. I won’t be renewing my subscription to HBO over this (I’m upset I bought a whole year), and I won’t be opting for Disney+ in the future either, as it sounds like they are doing similar things (and more). To me, “no ads” means “no ads”. I’m done with these technical definitions people come up with in board rooms to subvert customer expectations and erode product quality.

wicket 6d ago

The linked wiki focuses on a new user agreement from January 2025. A link to the referenced article might have been more appropriate: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Disney-New-user-agreement-allows-ads-before-movies-in-all-subscriptions-11455127.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Disney-New-user-agreement-allow... As far as I can tell, this new user agreement only applies to Germany, at least for now.

Anoian 6d ago

PSA: Soon german brand AVM will have dns blocking of advertising right in their routers (fritz box). Search the web for Fritz!OS 8.40 if you are interested.

philipallstar 6d ago

Use BBC iPlayer and you will see a lot of ads. Just for BBC content.

dwedge 6d ago
Use BBC from abroad and you see scam ads and the "which bar would you move to save the king" crap. They're not morally above this, only legally within the UK

huxflux 6d ago

Bye bye Disney!

oldsklgdfth 6d ago

Working in video ads has validated that I basically never pay for video or music services. 90% of dev time is spent optimizing the monetization path while the playback path needs to be good enough. Anecdotally, appleTV never remembers which episode I was watching or the timestamp in the episode. I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV. That said, IMO this is the only business model for streaming companies and content owners to see bucketloads of money, so it sticks. Also, free tier makes for easy entry. But I would gladly pay $10/month for a seamless streaming experience (app and playback) where I just select a couple of titles at a time. Similar to the mail version of netflix, but without snail mail. At this point, streaming a known catalog is a text-book system, albeit expensive in terms of distro and bandwidth.

tehwebguy 6d ago
> I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV. That’s what all cable news, reality TV, game shows and sports channels are!
- alt227 6d ago
  These days I feel like I get much better value paying for cable with hundreds of channels than I do any streaming service.
- oldsklgdfth 5d ago
  In my experience, I'm usually revising TV shows and movies that I enjoy. Say I want to rewatch the office or snatch. I just don't have the patience for the dongle to wake up and refresh all the banner ads, then the app to load, then get ads. I should appreciate how far technology has come that a tiny computer is running off 10W to connect to the internet to watch and listen to anything I can imagine. But in that moment, I just want it to work as smoothly as turning on a dvd player.

OrvalWintermute 6d ago

This has the potential to seriously hurt their subscription model business

ChrisArchitect 6d ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769395

deleted 6d ago

[deleted]

GreenLightGo 6d ago

Advertising is getting more unbearable and disgusting every day. Does advertising actually attract anyone anymore? It just pushes people away...

zackmorris 6d ago

Ads are money laundering. Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No. Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.

Fergusonb 6d ago
"zip it cookie"

joshtronic 6d ago

Why aren’t we raging at movie theaters? They’ve been putting ads before the content we actually paid to see for a long time now

leipert 6d ago
At the movies I can grab popcorn while the ads play. And usually the ads are for other movies, often enough topical. Watching an action movie, get ads for more action movies. If ads are playing on the TV, they inject themselves into your home. Especially kids now wanting to buy or watch that you didn’t get to vet.
GuinansEyebrows 6d ago
i don't think i've ever seen a discussion about movie theaters online where people weren't complaining about preroll ads, going back a good 20 years when this started to happen :)

leipert 6d ago

And I literally cannot log in to cancel my subscription. Caught in some redirect loop.

vachina 6d ago

You guys are paying for Disney+?

lenerdenator 6d ago

Remember: Cable TV started out as ad-free. I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free. Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.

plazmatic 6d ago

[dead]

whatever1 6d ago

Also all of the subscription services now have such draconian IP checks, that the false positives for password sharing have become super annoying. Every time I have to prove that I am me. Literally netflix, disney+, nytimes have become so annoying to use that I had to cancel.

koe123 6d ago

Pirating is so back

Melatonic 6d ago

Didn't they originally say there would be no ads on Disney+ ? Now they're one of the worst. Hard to watch anything on there. When the alternatives are free and a better product (no ads and easier to use) it seems odd to expect people to pay for something less convenient.

mahboi 6d ago
Because some people really want to watch some particular show. If so then good for them, idc what Disney does.

pendenthistory 6d ago

Lol, no thanks. I'm back to piratebay.

alienbaby 6d ago

Really, people don't pay for 'ad free' .. rather, they do, but what they really want is 'interruption free', which I think is why Disney+ promoting their own content as part a stream is essentially perceived as an 'ad'. I personally think it should be considerd an ad regardless of it being your own content or not. I don't care if it's someone else's , or your content, it's an advert for that content.

mahboi 6d ago
Reminds me of the old Disney Channel that had tons of self-ads on it

tsylba 6d ago

The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.). Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition. A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.

deleted 6d ago
[deleted]

ricardobeat 6d ago

They increased yearly subscription just two months ago, from €139 to €159. Those €20 alone should pay for the ads. And Disney+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all, while providing very limited content. This is completely out of touch.

happyopossum 6d ago
> Disney+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all A cursory search found that the first 3 subs I checked were the same cost or more than disney+ (HBO Max, Fox One, and Netflix)

happyopossum 6d ago

> January 27, 2025 So, not new. Got it

hsuduebc2 6d ago

There is no other reason to use this apps other than convenience which is keep getting smaller and pricier.

wigster 6d ago

I bailed on disney when they went Trump and stopped Jimmy Kimmel Live! Have not missed it.

danbrooks 6d ago

Not sure this is as nefarious as it might look at first glance. Disney+ supports a variety of content types - some of which naturally have ads. A big example is the Super Bowl (coming in February), which has always had ads.