That $3 represents a 37.5% increase. From $8 to $11.
This, yet again, showcases to the people claiming the "ad experience is optional" are ignoring the fact that the new "normal" price will be the ad experience, and that ad-less will be a premium tier priced accordingly. We've seen it numerous times, but yet people still repeat the same tired defense.
It is highly unlikely Disney will extract the full $3 from ad revenue, therefore this is just a price discrimination strategy disguised as the illusion of choice.
They want to raise the price. If all they wanted wad to offer an ad subsidized option, they could have dropped the price for that: "Pay less if you are OK with watching ads" and had a new $5 tier.
I don't really see the problem. A company's allowed to charge whatever they want for access and prices will always go up. I think it's good the companies are even giving us a choice about ads.
> I think it's good the companies are even giving us a choice about ads.
That's the problem. Companies can do a thing, then people can criticize them for it. An almost 40% price increase is worthy of criticism.
People jump to defend it with "but you get a choice!" While ignoring that your choice is either: Pay the massive price hike OR get a substantially worse user experience. That's a pretty terrible "choice," and that too is deserving of critique.
Jumping to defend companies treating people this way is exactly WHY companies feel they can treat people this way. It is a destructive cycle. Soon we'll have micro-transactions in streaming and people will jump to defend the "choice" of that too.
> You have a third choice, you could take your dollars elsewhere to get more bang for your buck.
This is true if you're just looking at entertainment in general (and that's a fair approach). If you specifically want Disney+'s content, there are only two choices (plus the implicit "choose not to have access").
They can do what they like, legally- perhaps even morally.
We can be mad about it; because they make the deal we signed up to materially worse and invalidate all previous arguments to their defense historically.
"Disney+ costs a lot, but at least theres no ads"
now:
"Disney+ can be cheaper with ads!" (dismissing the fact that it's the same price and still more expensive than alternatives that existed without ads)
It's good they're giving us a choice, maybe. But the offered service is actively getting worse due to the addition of that choice, because the current paid tier will now include ads, rather than them introducing a cheaper tier with ads.
I pay for the bandwidth though, and ads just waste it and cost me more time and money - we don't really save anything with a "lower cost" plan in the end. And stop pretending to be a daft that they are doing us some a favour - it's only pure greed driving these decisions. Note that that with online advertisement comes harvesting of our personal data too.
I've been barking about this for years, and is the reason I'm forced to pay for YouTube Premium as well. The amount of time alone ads cost me insane, and the bandwidth (at home or especially on mobile) usage involved means almost any form of video advertising is incredibly costly to me, and any free service costing one hour of minimum wage work per month saves me many, many hours (in literal cost hours and pure time) in the long run.
Better option - uBlock Orgin https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/ - saves me 100's of megabytes of data every day. I am sure it will also soon block ads on the streaming platforms too (provided you don't use Chrome or stream through apps).
Since (as others have noted) there are already a couple services like this, what about something like:
The user sets up a profile with a list of shows they like, and the website tells which streaming service is the best one to subscribe to. Extra credit if it has an option for "I prefer shows which are in the process of being released weekly/I count shows I can binge all at once."
And -- it is a bit of a stretch, but maybe
"binge-o" is a good name.
ShowRSS + uTorrent has worked for me. I know, I know, "but illegal/the moneys". I watch like... 1 show on Netflix (2 now with Sandman), 1 show on the CW (soon to be 0, as it's the Flash), 1 show on HBO Max (Harley Quinn), etc. Paying for an entire service (or cable) just because I like one show they offer is ridiculous. The closest I'd come to doing it is Disney+ because of all the Marvel content, but even then I'm paying for access to a shit-ton of Disney content I couldn't care any less about. (I currently do pay for Netflix, mostly because I subbed to support their pickup of Lucifer and then decided to stay subbed until Umbrella Academy dies.)
Basically, what I'm saying is, as long as every company wants to withhold the content I like behind a paywall the size of tons of content I don't want, ShowRSS + uTorrent = the pirate's life for me. Yo-ho.
(Legitimately, if I was able to pay for just the individual shows I watch, I would pay for 100% of them. But no one offers that option, so... shrug )
I never got into the whole piracy thing (despite growing up in it's heyday), but I haven't thought much about the ethics of it and certainly wouldn't judge people who do it.
Mostly the "cost" of staying up to date with best piracy practices doesn't seem worth it, to me.
I happen to know the price of hulu+disney+ is around $20 currently (because I just canceled my subscription, haha). I vaguely recall that is pretty close to the retail cost of a season of a show, around a decade ago, I think. So it seems like an OK deal in that context -- I watched way more than one season of a single show on the two services, per month (but like, I want to cut down on my passive content consumption anyway).
To access all the shows I watch, I would need: a cable package for the CW ($40) + a Disney+ subscription ($11 with this hike) + Netflix ($15) + HBO Max ($15) = $81/month for a handful of shows. That's the average cost of my entire power bill -- a necessary cost -- for entertainment. If they can charge $15 for access to everything on Netflix, surely they can charge much less for one or two shows that I actually want to watch (and of course, same with the other services).
If you look at it that way, it does seem like a bit of a ripoff.
Personally I don't get super into particular shows -- so, on Netflix I suppose they have The Office (I'm not sure actually it is just an example), but on Hulu they have Mr Mayor... if focusing down to a couple streaming service means that I have to chance the specific "lighthearted, vaguely sarcastic but still comforting workplace comedy" in my lineup, I don't think this is a huge cost.
I dunno. Lots of companies seem to treat their streaming offerings as undifferentiated commodities, so why shouldn't we, right?
I already do this organically. When friends tell me a season of X or Y is coming I pay for Netflix.
I imagine if enough people do this, companies will counter-act by making certain shows only available to loyal users. "This is a Platinum Plus show; you need at least platinum level 3 to watch this; watch 100 hours to level up!"
I think the counter would be to spread it out more. One a week on a 10 week show gets 3 months. Throw a couple 2 week breaks in the middle of a season and you squeeze an extra month out.
Sorry - sarcasm isn't the best spirit of Hacker News curiosity. I should've found a kinder way to indicate that the grandparent comment was about all services, not specific to Netflix.
Quite a big increase, pure money grabbing move, since they launched the ad service at the same price as the current service.
Sure they assume this is basically free money, anyone that doesn't want to pay extra just has to put up the adverts, anyone that doesn't can pay extra. The board likely love this idea.
It's $3 more a month. We can all talk about percentages but it's $3/mo or $36/year and not a big increase. I get feeling like it's a bait and switch but it's not a lot of money and not outrageous.
I'm not a Disney+ subscriber or even a fan of voluntary subscriptions but we should all be more outraged by food and housing prices than the cost of entertainment.
I'm very old and know all about cable pricing. Not sure what that has to do with my comment though. That said, I haven't had cable in ~18 years so maybe I'm missing the correlation.
It won't be the last price increase and it's nothing to do with inflation no matter what they say or indicate. I agree you'll see bi-yearly increases from every streaming service since they will all follow each other's lead. In 10 years Disney+ will most likely be twice the price it is today.
They will raise prices until people stop paying which I suspect won't be happening for a very long time if ever.
I'm hearing this with everything though.... "It's just another $x"
Prime, netflix etc etc, it's not just another $x, it's a lot of money when you add it up, particularly when Disney are not adding any additional value for doing so and instead just doing pure profiteering. There are a lot of companies out there seeing all the price increases in things and just using it as an excuse to increase there profits.
Amazon did something similar with Freeve (or whatever it is called). So today streaming services have specific days they air their blockbuster series episodes (same as traditional TV) and now we get ads (same as traditional TV). Both, I assume, to remain profitable. So how exactly did streaming disrupt traditional contebt broadcasting again?
At least you can still pay more to not be interrupted by ads on Disney+. Anything on Freeve is frustrating to watch with no way that I know of to pay to go ad free. If someone knows if you can, please comment.
This is something that makes me laugh at SeriusXM - tons of commercials that let you know there's no commercials and then advertise their other stations and apps.
I was watching Netflix Swiss familiy Robinson-in-space thing, and they had like a giant product placement showing of how big the package of Oreos they had brought with them was.
It was both distracting, annoyning and an ad in all but name. You would still call it an ad if the characters in the show also acted in the commercial, right?
Slowly and inexorably, we’re rebuilding cable TV on top of streaming. The difference is that we finally get the a la carte plan we consumers have always wanted.
It's morally neutral, at best. I suppose watching a pirated Disney property doesn't deprive Disney of anything, since someone anti-Disney+ otherwise wouldn't have watched it on Disney+ anyway.
Maybe if Disney produced content people wanted to watch instead of letting the insane leverage their platform to elevate their voice, more people might be interested in subscribing.
Discovery, post merger, seems to be interesting in refocusing Warner back on creating quality content that people actually are interested in - what a concept!
Disney+ did not surpass Netflix, go look at the earnings report. All Disney properties (Hulu, ESPN+, Disney+) lumped together surpassed Netflix. And some of those subs are potentially double and triple counted because of that.
Not sure if they included global numbers but for example, in India they have hotstar as a property which shows live sports and is huge, which bundles up with Disney+.
Disney+ is huge, and it got there so fast. It's absolutely dizzying to think how fast they are going to blow past Netflix with Disney+ alone.
It must be stressful to be in leadership at Netflix right now. How do you compete? More Chaos Monkeys? It's clear the differentiator is no longer engineering but IP.
> Disney+ is huge, and it got there so fast. It's absolutely dizzying to think how fast they are going to blow past Netflix with Disney+ alone.
Well. No surprise given how much buy-ups and mergers the regulators tolerated... Out of the list for popular franchises, Disney owns the top two (MCU/26 B$, Star Wars/10 B$) and has significant involvement in the third place (Spider-Man). Additionally, they own Avatar (which is the most profitable movie ever made), The Simpsons, Indiana Jones, the entire catalog of Pixar, the entire classic and re-made OG Disney IP and a ton of other stuff [1].
Of the really popular stuff, the only things Disney doesn't own are Harry Potter (which is a complicated dumpster fire not just given the tendency of JKR to set her own life work ablaze, but also IP-rights-wise [2]), the DC Universe (which hasn't managed to stay even close to competitive with MCU), Star Trek (which went off Netflix to Paramount+) and James Bond.
The future of entertainment is scary - Disney needs to be broken up, or the government needs to step in and mandate that copyright holders have to provide fair and equal streaming rights to everyone, similar to the music industry (which managed to get the hint on its own, and now there's more than healthy competition in the market with OG Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal and a boatload of smaller ones).
Yeah I'm ambivalent about if what they do is good. I do think that what they've done with Star Wars is better than whatever Lucasfilm did with the franchise between 1983 and when they sold.
Should new Star Wars be a big part of what I watch? I enjoy them, but I'm undecided.
MCU just feels like rubbish, but it prints money for reasons I just can't figure out.
Going to disagree on Star Wars. The prequels at least had a somewhat coherent story line (aside from the great Darth Jar Jar conspiracy) and artistic direction, the new sequels are... just WTF? It's still blowing my mind what went wrong there. It seems like they didn't have any sort of plan beforehand and just went with whatever they came up with, completely ditching decades of Expanded Universe lore.
In contrast, the MCU is the perfect execution of "how to make a movie out of a boatload of source material". IMHO, them sticking to the lore well enough that the die-hard nerds don't have much to whine was the key decision that made the MCU what it is... but now that the MCU has gotten so absurdly large, it's going to be interesting if they can keep up with that attention to detail.
> It's clear the differentiator is no longer engineering but IP.
That's been obvious for a very long time. It's why stuff like Stranger Things exists and is being milked. NF leadership have been playing that game for a long time now, they knew the time of reckoning would come; the question is whether they managed to build enough defences to resist the predicted storm and stay afloat in the long term.
I signed up for the Disney bundle recently, mostly because it was free with my Amex card. So I'm counted as 3 subscribers (even though I've never bothered to sign into ESPN+), and I provide $0 revenue to Disney.
I think the lesson is that it is easy to have great growth numbers when you give your service away, loose billions, and triple count subscribers.
Disney has more subscriptions than Netflix, when you add together the streaming services they offer. ("Subscribers" implies people, but that's much harder to count accurately.)
So the people who took Discovery from science-focused educational programming to truckers and pawn stars are calling the shots? That doesn't sound good to me, but obviously they know what the people want.
One notable recent thing that stood out to me is that the kids' show Baymax! had an episode where the plot was that a 12-year-old girl needed help shopping for menstrual hygiene products and got recommendations on what was most comfortable from a transgender man. Which is likely to be very confusing for most kids to say the least and was clearly added to score political points, not to make a better show.
I had to go look up the scene, and it was Baymax asking for opinions and getting a bunch of opinions from everyone in the shopping isle including one from a man who says he always gets the ones with wings. That seemed to be it?
This, yet again, showcases to the people claiming the "ad experience is optional" are ignoring the fact that the new "normal" price will be the ad experience, and that ad-less will be a premium tier priced accordingly. We've seen it numerous times, but yet people still repeat the same tired defense.
It is highly unlikely Disney will extract the full $3 from ad revenue, therefore this is just a price discrimination strategy disguised as the illusion of choice.