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

ljf

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.

cynicalsecurity

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

lordleft

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.

jamesnorden

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

semiquaver

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.

jonathanlydall

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.

oybng

Stop. Giving. Them. Your. Money.

raffraffraff

I love this use of the word "agreement"

voganmother42

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

Alifatisk

Why am I even paying anymore.

matheusmoreira

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.

ghusto

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

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).

mosura

Disney have/had this amazing strategy diagram 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

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

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-allow... As far as I can tell, this new user agreement only applies to Germany, at least for now.

Anoian

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

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

huxflux

Bye bye Disney!

oldsklgdfth

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.