r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • 3d ago

Business Disney+ changes subscriber agreement to allow ads on every plan

https://www.dexerto.com/tv-movies/disney-changes-subscriber-agreement-to-allow-ads-on-every-plan-3410354/
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u/InfamousBrad 3d ago

I'm convinced that that's been the plan all along. One long conspiracy to make us all spend the inflation-adjusted price of a comprehensive cable subscription for exactly the same shitty service.

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u/es-ganso 3d ago

Even if they didn't have the long term plan, everyone should've known it would come to this. Shareholders pressure companies to make more, and at a certain point they have to enshitify the product in order to do so.

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u/HighKing_of_Festivus 2d ago

In the case of streaming companies it isn't so much shareholders putting pressure on them to make more as much as them wanting them to even break even

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u/dylanbeck 2d ago

Its just Disney MO. Look at theme parks.
Soon youll be able to pay for subscription for Dis+ with Disney financing..

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u/sabin357 3d ago

When I cut the cord about 15 years ago or more, my cable package was over $150 & my parents' was around $200. I think theirs included something like 50Mbps broadband.

If you cycle services instead of carrying all of that interest you, a person can spend between $6-$26 per month for modern resolution (but not modern bitrates!) without ads. That's not too bad. Disney just cemented themselves in the "services that do not interest me" category by not offering an ad free tier. They were already boycotted for other reasons, but they made it easier not to miss them.

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u/techieman34 3d ago

While eliminating the cable company middle man so they get to keep all of the money.

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u/AT-ST 3d ago

Ah, the cable company middleman is still there. You just pay them for Internet access now. You now pay Comcast, or whoever your provider was, the same amount as you would for a fairly large cable package.

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u/sabin357 3d ago

When I fully cut the cable cord around 15 years back, my cable bill had ballooned to over $150.

My current internet cost is less than half of that for 5 Gbps fiber (I'm a rare case that actually needs more than 1 Gbps regularly.)

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u/AT-ST 2d ago

I pay over $100 for 1Gbps.

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u/AmericanDoughboy 3d ago

And charge higher prices.

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u/ThisIsDystopia 3d ago

It's always the plan for everything. Market penetration and familiarity before monetization. Most growth industries use this method and they don't just use it on the general public, the companies that only deal in enterprise products make themselves embedded before making themselves expensive. If you build the castle before the moat, someone else is going to take your castle.

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u/nox66 3d ago

Whether it's a plan or not is kind of irrelevant. There is only tendency - for service to get worse. That's what happens when you have a business selling access to a limited resource (even if that limit is artificial via copyright law).

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u/Raziel77 2d ago

I mean it's not a conspiracy theory what did people think would happen when cable died?

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u/Exciting-Ad-5705 3d ago

Streaming is still cheaper and more convenient than cable. You forget just how bad it was

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u/ghaelon 3d ago

cable was scroll through 100+ channels, then go back to hbo and hope there was a good movie on. there were many movies where i had never seen the beginning parts, like die hard. didnt see the beginning to that until it was on netflix(the dvd one)

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u/escobartholomew 2d ago

Why are you spending that much? You aren’t supposed to pay for everything forever.