In January 2025, Disney+ updated its Subscriber Agreement to include provisions allowing advertisements in content across all subscription tiers, including those...

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371 comments

semiquaver10 days 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.

DonsDiscountGas10 days ago
> 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’”

Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not? Does anyone not? And if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?

Gareth32110 days ago
I strongly agree, and it frustrates me when people and companies claim that advertising their own products "doesn't count." I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads. These are all the ads they permit on Premium, despite advertising everywhere that Premium removes all ads:

* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.

* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.

* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.

* Email advertisements for Google products and services.

* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.

I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.

jmathai10 days ago
I’ve been a paying customer of Dropbox’s consumer plan for over a decade. Each time I visit their website I am greeted with a full page modal ad asking me to upgrade to a different plan I have no use for.

I’ve dismissed it every time. I don’t mind being shown that ad once. But it bothers me that they don’t care enough about my experience using their product to provide a “never show this again” option.

Or just use some metrics to know that if I dismiss it 50 times then maybe I’m not interested.

dijit9 days ago
I get super bent out of shape when Apple TV+ advertises shows before the one I am trying to watch; even sometimes advertising the show that I am trying to watch itself and spoiling things.

I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.

semiquaver10 days ago
I grew up with the Disney channel on cable as a kid in the 90s. Disney channel at that time was ad-free except for cross-promotions for other Disney channel shows, most of which I (as a kid who liked the Disney channel) wanted to know more about. I have HBO Now/max/go/whatever and before most shows there’s a skippable promo for HBO stuff. So yeah, I don’t think this is new and Disney+ as it is now is way more ad-free than either of those, so I’m not surprised they are trying to nudge the status quo back to a historical equilibrium; it’s just what these companies do

I’ll always pay more to see fewer ads. My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up watching linear TV in the 90s and I’m going to keep it that way. If Disney+ gets in the way of that I’ll stop paying them and stop using their service, easy as that.

etothet9 days ago
I agree. I noticed recently an ad directly inside of 1Password. I’ve paid for a 1Password subscription since 2013, and have had a family plan for many years. I know the company changed hands several years back after AgileBits sold to VC, but this type of disrespect caused me to cancel my membership. There are plenty of alternatives that haven’t turned their focus to the “Enterprise” and aren’t trying to extract as much money as possible from their paying customers.
shakna10 days 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...

echelon10 days 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

rubyfan10 days ago
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...

exe3410 days ago
The quoted text is identical to what I have received in an email from Disney+. I only tend to get a month at a time when I want to watch a given show, but if paying doesn't remove adverts, I'm not going to pay.
mrweasel10 days ago
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?
josefresco10 days ago
"because we don’t have an alternative"

Ads embedded on the playing field? Sure. Billboards visible or sponsor logos on uniforms? I get it. Actual commercials? This is a solved issue for decades, there are "alternatives" as others have pointed out. This is a "Boiling frog" situation.

bena9 days ago
No, there's nothing really to do. They aren't producing the feed, they're essentially hosting a stream from another broadcaster.

For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.

I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.

But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.

scotty7910 days ago
> Ads embedded on the playing field? Sure. Billboards visible or sponsor logos on uniforms?

To be honest if I'm paying for no ads I'd be expect to have an option to blur that crap on inpaint it with AI.

Monitors and TVs should have this option.

ChrisRR10 days ago
I read it more as a contract issue rather than a technical issue
pickleglitch9 days ago
Our research shows that people with peanut allergies buy a lot of candy bars. We want to tap into that market, so we make a product call NoPeanutBars. But making them in a dedicated peanut-free facility costs a lot of money and extra work, and we really can't figure out how to do it. So we just put a disclaimer on the back that says NoPeanutBars may actually contain peanuts. What's the big deal? We don't put the peanuts in there on purpose!
matheusmoreira10 days 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.

bunderbunder9 days ago
This is part of why last year I mostly switched to just borrowing DVDs from my public library. Avoiding ads by not paying seems to do the trick rather nicely. The quality and variety is better than what I can find on any one streaming service, too.
jerf9 days ago
Every year it gets more and more important to learn how to not be sucked in by a small amount of convenience. "Capitalism" has figured out how to abuse your desire for maximum convenience. You need to figure out what your price is for it, and stick to it like glue.

The funny thing is the sooner you get off of some particular convenience treadmill the easier it is to stay off.

dleslie9 days ago
I highly recommend asking if your library has access to Kanopy. It's a video streaming service for libraries, and works on a monthly token system.

My local library has access to Kanopy, Libby, and Blackstone. And as a Canadian, I've got CBC gem as well.

The available library of films, documentaries, books, and so forth is enormous. All bereft of ads, and mostly bereft of slop.

eecks9 days ago
Why DVD and not Blu-Ray?
Melatonic9 days ago
I love libraries but DVD are pretty ancient in terms of video quality
MarkWayneNewton10 days ago
The seas are always open, friend.
jollyllama9 days ago
You're not wrong. But the only solutions appear to be varying levels of being a free-rider, which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable. The long-term solution is probably to only consume locally-made goods and content, public-domain content, or vintage goods.
javcasas9 days ago
> which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable

And the difference from the current situation is?

mahboi9 days ago
Consumers do seem less willing to waste time watching ads than before, though. Cable TV was insane.
dwedge9 days ago
It's interesting that I've seen this argument 4 times on hacker news, all in the past 2 weeks and never before. Really is quite a small bubble
matheusmoreira9 days ago
I've made this argument here on Hacker News dozens of times over many years now.
GuinansEyebrows9 days ago
to what do you attribute the increase you've noticed?
lordleft10 days 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.
happytoexplain10 days ago
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.
bunderbunder9 days ago
I also question the extent to which this is true.

Lately I've been helping my mom downsize. She's got boxes and boxes of household goods that she held on to because it belonged to her mother or grandmother or great aunt or whoever. Basically just, when the time came to clean out the old house, dump the kitchen cabinets into a box, put the box in the basement, and leave it there for 40 years.

And the thing that's struck me is how much of this stuff is cheaply made and barely holds together. Sure, there's the occasional well-built item that resembles the stuff I'm used to seeing in antique stores. But mostly I'm just getting a lesson in how much survivorship bias informs my perception of 20th century consumer products.

If anything the real trend is the shift to plastic, which can be more durable but is also more prone to complete instead of partial failure and generally isn't repairable. e.g. a tin measuring cup might dent easily, but can also be bent back into shape. A plastic one probably won't suffer anything more than a scratch when you drop it, but when it finally does crack that's the end of it.

Speaking of plastic, so many people nostalgically remember Tupperware as a quality product that's much nicer than what you can get nowadays. But the truth is it was a multi-level marketing scam and their products were often contaminated with heavy metals. It used to be a lot easier to prop up a brand image in the pre-Internet days, when consumers largely couldn't talk to each other en masse like we do nowadays.

sarchertech10 days ago
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.

laughing_man10 days 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.
usrbinbash10 days 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.

zmgsabst10 days ago
I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.
lenerdenator9 days ago
It used to be that the goal of a company was to compete in a market and gain value through performance in that market over the long term.

In the 1990s, several CEOs, including Jack Welch, realized how exactly things work. Namely, most shares are held by retirement and pension plans who employ entire companies' worth of people to find a way to diversify and hedge, and the reporting period for their earnings is 90 days. You had major chunks of corporate capital held by people who couldn't really care less about anything other than the line going up, and any way to do so within three months was valid.

Once a company has achieved a certain market position, the long-term and non-financial aspects of holding shares (pride in the company, an interest in the market they competed in, etc.) are unimportant, and the customer's opinion stops mattering as much. You can assume that enough customers will stay around through sheer inertia no matter what you do, and that includes breaking up the company and selling it for scrap.

Since most shareholders aren't really attached to any one company's holdings, they plan for customers to leave when companies do anti-consumer things, and if a company is broken up, they just take the earnings per share on that break-up and plow it into something else that sounds like it'd be profitable.

You have to do business with people who are operating in a spot below that market position if you really want them to care about pleasing you as a customer.

mitxela10 days ago
It's the lack of competition. They know you're not going to stop paying them.
mrweasel10 days ago
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?

kypro10 days ago
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.

carlosjobim9 days ago
There's always competition for the consumer dollar, unless you are the only business selling necessities for survival such as electricity, gas, food, and such.
matheusmoreira10 days ago
It's because they are monopolists. Copyrights are monopolies, and copyright holders are monopolists.

Abolish copyright and I guarantee they will completely change their attitude.

layer89 days ago
Without copyright, almost none of the content would get produced, especially in this digital age of zero-cost copying, and “they” (the companies) wouldn’t exist.
bunderbunder9 days ago
Copyrights are such constrained monopolies, though. More or less on the same level as how Nike has a monopoly on Air Jordans, but not on shoes in general.

One of the most interesting things about media consumerism is the extent to which people fail to realize that watching something else is always an option.

scotty7910 days ago
Copyright is the cancer of the human culture. Always has been.
ljf10 days 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.

le-mark10 days 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.
tehwebguy9 days 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.
lennartb9 days ago
The only "streaming service" we really use consistently anymore is Youtube.
basisword10 days 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.
hustlejuice9 days 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
jamesnorden10 days ago
They're turning streaming into regular TV again, absolute nonsense.
fuzzfactor10 days ago
The joke's on them and they probably don't even know it.

Remember that Disney owns the ABC TV broadcast network.

With this move, the regular TV news that has been streaming from abcnews.com and local affiliates for years has finally become inaccessible from all my Windows 11 PCs. This is using clean Windows with Edge only, no 3rd party apps or ad blockers, not relying on anything but good old Windows & Edge to handle security & privacy as well as they can.

Pre-recorded clips still play but not live news any more from ABC News or local station websites.

The same old PCs that played abcnews just fine until recently, and still play everything else at all resolutions.

The live internet streams were regular TV news with regular TV ads as always on their regular websites. No broadcast sports or entertainment programs were included, on the web those time slots were replaced by things like public interest programs from ABC studios. Including the same number of ads as the scheduled in-house news programs.

This hurts the advertisers more than anybody, Disney has now abruptly cut off countless web users who have always been just fine with the traditional 24/7 ads on the ad-supported news, apparently so Disney+ fans can be made more comfortable with any ads being eased in to paid premium programming. Just because they are on the same internet, that's a lot of collateral damage.

If I was an advertiser I would be hitting the ceiling and demanding far lower ad fees from Disney than there was a couple weeks ago. Now that casual random internet viewers have been kicked off the news stream in countless numbers.

DarkNova610 days 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.
usef-10 days ago
Didn't cable have ads too?

The amount of ads I see in life compared to the 90s is still drastically reduced.

tremon9 days ago
Not exactly, it's more like paying ten different cable companies at the same time.
throwaway8582510 days ago
They have a government granted temporary monopoly.
WesolyKubeczek10 days 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.
ymolodtsov10 days ago
Except you can cancel it from the next month with a few clicks.

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