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

94 points DeepLogin 4 hours ago 50 comments

ljf 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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

mitxela 25 minutes ago | parent

The system discovered that it's always easier to force someone to give you money than to offer something they want to pay for.

lordleft 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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.

kuerbel 1 hour ago | parent

It depends on the product though. The problem with streaming is that structurally, you have competition (other streaming services) but content wise not so much. If you want to watch Foundation, you need Apple tv. Netflix might have another good SciFi series, but it's not foundation... same for any other movie or series... in a way, people are more open to accept these terms because they want to watch their favorite show. So there is no real competition. And they get away with it because customers accept it.

Leonard_of_Q 40 minutes ago | parent

Of course there is competition: "piracy". The thing streaming was supposed to (mostly) eliminate by being "legal", easy, not too expensive, ad-free and easy to use while offering a wealth of things to see and hear. It even worked, for a while, in some places. Then they limited what could be seen and heard because of corporate politicking. Then the price went up, just a bit. Then more movies and artists suddenly went dark. Prices were raised again. Terms of use were changed allowing "limited" advertising where there was none before. Prices went up again while disallowing that TV upstairs to partake without buying another subscription. More ads, fewer things to see and hear, price rises, rinse and repeat.

What is that I see in the distance? A ship, right? They hail me, "Ahoy matey, come aboard, arrrrrrrrrrr...."

applfanboysbgon 31 minutes ago | parent

This is, however, part of why we're trending towards mandatory ID verification to use the internet+ attempts to illegalize encryption and consumer VPNs.

mitxela 28 minutes ago | parent

VPNs only help you with Bittorrent piracy. The kind where you buy a set-top box is still most easily caught by a police officer seeing you using the box, or selling you the box, not by anything they can do on the internet.

kuerbel 23 minutes ago | parent

That is the internet equivalent of fare dodging. Some people are doing it? Not that much of a problem. More people are doing it? See, they'll say it's not worth it anymore to produce expensive shows and movies. And that's it.

I'd rather see a healthy physical media culture again. Hard to enshitify that.

applfanboysbgon 12 minutes ago | parent

> And that's it.

But there will still be demand for content, and people who are willing to pay for a non-enshittified experience. Piracy is essentially the consumer bargaining chip in an era of unprecedented centralization and monopoly power.

mitxela 7 minutes ago | parent

They should start making good quality products and charging a price people are willing to pay then. Do you realise piracy is just about the only leverage consumers have here?

It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.

Leonard_of_Q 2 minutes ago | parent

The fare-dodging example is valid for recent movies and music but it falters for older stuff where "older" means "older than the original copyright term", i.e. between 18 and 21 years. Beyond that it is more comparable to charging a wind-fee to sailing boats or a current-fee to river runners: taking money for a common good. Copyright has been extended and extended again just to keep people from drawing a cartoon mouse or singing a birthday song and that makes current copyright terms just as piratical as the self-styled internet pirates who have no qualms about releasing movies the day they are premiered.

Here's a fix: bring copyright terms back to something sensible, say 15 years. After that point copyrighted material is free to use for non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes you still need a licence for another 10-15 years. Beyond that it becomes public domain, no licence required.

fn-mote 24 minutes ago | parent

> there is no real competition

Totally false. The competition is in what shows people watch. The Pit not available on Netflix? Oh well, I’ll watch something else. There’s plenty of content. People are not subscribing to BritBox just to watch one show the heard was good.

kuerbel 12 minutes ago | parent

That is not at all supported by evidence though. You might do that but it's an anecdote.

E.g this survey: https://www.nexttv.com/news/a-hit-driven-biz-40-of-consumers...

"40% of Consumers Sign Up For an SVOD Service to Watch a Specific Show"

Or this Ipsos survey:

https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-235725

[...]almost 4 in 10 (38%) agree that they often subscribe to a channel to watch a specific show[...]

happytoexplain 59 minutes ago | parent

I think this is the single biggest change making everything worse. Lots of businesses used to care about their own products, since quality and brand image seemed like obviously important things. As the machine ran, and we got better and better at collecting and analyzing data, it became clear that the customer's view of you and your product didn't matter as much as we thought, and in fact it matters less and less the more businesses converge on that idea. But businesses still mostly cared about their own products, because they are run by humans, who tend to care about what they make naturally. However, eventually market forces pushed out normal humans.

sarchertech 30 minutes ago | parent

I don’t know if that’s true. Look at the amount of lethal product defects over the last 100 years.

And before the FDA existed, companies were perfectly willing to put formaldehyde in milk, mercury in candy, and arsenic in vegetables.

malfist 9 minutes ago | parent

Whoa there, next you're going to tell me government action can benefit society

mitxela 29 minutes ago | parent

It's the lack of competition. They know you're not going to stop paying them.

mrweasel 21 minutes ago | parent

Even with the lack of competition, shouldn't you have at least some pride on the product your offering? That's really what gets me every time, the fact that many companies actually don't really care about their product and clearly doesn't take any pride in it.

The people making the movies and shows, writes, actors, production crew, all of those, probably do care, but in the management layers at Disney, Netflix, HBO, you name it, they don't seem care about the actual product. While the hell would you work at e.g. Disney, if you don't care about movies, cartoons and stories?

mitxela 9 minutes ago | parent

No, why should they have pride? Having pride is more expensive than not having it, and the ones with pride have been naturally selected out of the market. The people making the movies don't care either, haven't you seen all the complaints about Hollywood becoming a slop factory?

kypro 19 minutes ago | parent

I don't think it's that. Most people simply don't care.

I'd stop paying them, but it always amazes me just how unbothered the average person is to watch 3 minutes of ads for 10 mins of content. Especially when it comes to platforms like YouTube.

jamesnorden 1 hour ago | parent

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

DarkNova6 1 hour ago | parent

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 43 minutes ago | parent

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 38 minutes ago | parent

They have a government granted temporary monopoly.

mitxela 26 minutes ago | parent

Permanent monopoly, because you'll always be watching what's current today, not 70 years ago

semiquaver 1 hour ago | parent

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 1 hour ago | parent

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...

echelon 9 minutes ago | parent

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

deathhand 1 hour ago | parent

Boohoo the billion dollar giant can't do the same thing that regional sports have been doing for the last 20! years with the likes of NFL and Baseball.

Words matter. Words in advertising should matter. The slope is ice when we allow corporations to wordsmith around what they sell you.

fabian2k 45 minutes ago | parent

There are a few cases of ads that might not be practical to remove, though most of that would be more like sponsors and ad content that is a part of the show. You can certainly get live sports without ads, though you will of course still have the pauses in the game that allow the ads in the first place. But it's not unusual to see e.g. the halftime in soccer filled with analysis on public television that doesn't allow ads in that circumstance.

And ads for their own services are still ads.

mr_mitm 34 minutes ago | parent

> You can certainly get live sports without ads

Jerseys, the floor, the ribbon fields and other places in live sports display ads that are near impossible to remove. There are ads in the teams' and venues' names. The NBA is even doing things like having the announcers say "this timeout is brought to you by Gatorade".

rubyfan 44 minutes ago | parent

They already run ads for Disney parks, Hulu, ESPN, and other Disney owned content in the Premium tier. They just call them promos or sponsorships in the prior agreement.

The new agreement allegedly introduces a third term “advertisements”.

> 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.

I say allegedly because I haven’t received any communication from Disney yet but various reporting refers to email people in European markets have received.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/disney-putti...

mrweasel 25 minutes ago | parent

I feel like they stopped doing that, but there was definitively ads for other movies and shows because some movies on Disney+, but I haven't seen it in a while. It was pretty badly done, because you'd get confused and assume you'd started the wrong movie, so maybe they rolled it back?

micromacrofoot 18 minutes ago | parent

In every large org, including disney, there are people who will fuck with you to the full extent of the terms and laws if they think it can increase profit... they do not care about quality, experience, or morals. I've fought these people about marketing emails at dozens of orgs as a consultant.

I guarantee they will eventually use this to show more ads. The goldfish grows to fit its bowl.

mitxela 10 minutes ago | parent

They don't stop at terms and laws. They stop at what loses money, through customer churn or lawsuits.

amelius 10 minutes ago | parent

Why can't they remove the embedded ads with AI?

Sheesh ... they're a big company. This should be easy.

jonathanlydall 1 hour ago | parent

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 27 minutes ago | parent

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"

oybng 47 minutes ago | parent

Stop. Giving. Them. Your. Money.

raffraffraff 35 minutes ago | parent

I love this use of the word "agreement"

voganmother42 27 minutes ago | parent

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

Alifatisk 24 minutes ago | parent

Why am I even paying anymore.