I genuinely wonder what kind of people thinks they are entitled to consume entertainment costing a lot of money to produce without paying anything.
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Disney+ Could Get a Free Ad-Supported Tier
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SnowPenguin
macrumors 6502
I think his complaints is about paying then getting ads on the top of that. Which is quite insulting.
We should get all these free tier streaming services together, sell them as a bundle with a monthly fee. We could call it....cable television!
People who mention "commercials on a paid service" make me question "did everyone feel this way when cable television was invented?" You get a huge bundle of channels, and you are paying a service to show them, and each of those channels has commercials. To get no commercials, then you pay a premium for those channels.
It just makes me chuckle.
We paid for cable tv and that had commercials (on basic cable). If you wanted no commercials, you paid a premium.
djplong
macrumors regular
10anta
macrumors regular
I'm not telling anyone that they have to setup adblock DNS or something similar on their router, but I can say, for me, eliminating all the ads on any steaming service or website that I use is an attractive proposition:
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
https://adguard-dns.io/en/public-dns.html
ThatGuyInLa
macrumors 6502a
While I agree and applaud any ad based tier being free as it should be! Since the ads pay for the damn service in the first place! Yes, fully expect an absurd amount of ads. Due to the actual cause of the problem. Excessive greed. This is what had them charging people for an ad based tier in the first place!
Well, there is the possibility of paying less money than adfree and getting some ads, versus free with a lot of ads. I do not see the insult, just different options.
SnowPenguin
macrumors 6502
It's a bad option at best. Some services used to be ad-free then turned into that like Amazon Video. The change was applied even to those who subscribed before it began.
I use adguard DNS on my Apple TV's and I can tell you it does NOT "eliminate ALL the ads on ANY streaming service".
We only have a couple streaming services that aren't ad-free but I can tell you we see plenty of ads on Amazon Prime Video.
Hopefully they’ll get the people who provide the ads for Apple News for a high quality experience.
/s
/s
Ads aren't necessarily enough to "pay for the darn service in the first place." It can depend on how many ads there are, how much they are able to charge, etc. Meeting cost and profit needs/goals may require more ads than they feel customers will tolerate and therefore there can still be a need for subscription revenue.
A pay/ad hybrid model has been the norm for content delivery for ages including television, newspapers and magazines. Additionally, sports venues have ads despite getting revenue from ticket sales, public transit has ads despite getting revenue from fares, taxis have ads despite getting revenue from fares, movies in theaters have ads at the beginning despite getting revenue from ticket sales, and so on.
While ads can bring down costs to consumers (subscription price, copy price, ticket price, fare, etc.), they aren't necessarily enough to entirely eliminate those costs.
Disney+ Annual Plan
2021 – €69.99
2022 – €89.90
2023 – €89.90
2024 – €109.90
2025 – €139.90
2026 – €159.90
I cancelled this year. Realistically I'm happy to pay up to around €100/year for it. I thought €90/year was the sweet spot. The thing I cannot stand is the price increase every single year. Enough is enough.
2021 – €69.99
2022 – €89.90
2023 – €89.90
2024 – €109.90
2025 – €139.90
2026 – €159.90
I cancelled this year. Realistically I'm happy to pay up to around €100/year for it. I thought €90/year was the sweet spot. The thing I cannot stand is the price increase every single year. Enough is enough.
Not sure this is comparable. With cable TV you paid for the delivery system (cable), and then content was provided for free (ish) with advertising. Remove advertising and you now paid for the content. Reasonably fair. In the current streaming era, I already pay for the delivery system supplied by an ISP. Now you want me to pay you to deliver advertising content to my house over a delivery system I have already paid for. Not so reasonable. I am happy to pay for content without advertising, I am not happy to pay for advertising which you are delivering to me using a system I paid for.
ThatGuyInLa
macrumors 6502a
Interesting points but you dilute the area of my comments focus, television. Before this techno-greed take-over. We had over air television with ads. We paid nothing for this. Well, not entirely true. Our taxes paid for some of it. The point is. You watched television "for free" with your antenna. It had ads. Then came this thing called HBO. You had to pay for it. Why would I? Cause you got movies and shows that you didn't need to sit through ad breaks. Now D+ is more an HBO and you should pay for it. Yes. With paid ad tiers, they (and others) have stolen and mutated antenna based televisions revenue concept to do so. These companies building content they can't afford with the ad revenue they get is the issue. Ultimately it's up to the audience. If people pay, they pay. If not? They do something else. I think this announcement from Disney shows an affect.
How are they not comparable? In both cases, you were/are paying for the delivery system (either to cable TV provider or ISP). In both cases you were/are paying to deliver advertising content to your house/device, in addition to the content itself.
Back in the day, you couldn't get channels like HBO, Showtime, Disney Channel, etc. as standalone products. You needed to also have a cable plan, which many/most people already did just as many/most people already have ISP plans today.
Also, premium channel "add-ons" were typically a lot more expensive (adjusting for inflation) than standalone premium streaming services today. For example, when the Disney Channel launched in the 1980s with far less content than Disney+ has (it wasn't even a 24 hour channel in its early years and didn’t have on demand), it was around $11/month extra which is around $37/month in today's dollars. Compare that to the $11.99/month (with ads) to $18.99/month (ad-free) prices for Disney+ today.
My reference to "television" also included cable channels with ads which the vast majority of customers have/had to pay for via a cable TV plan. Many consumers also didn't/don't have antennas and therefore pay/paid for network television (with ads) via cable TV plans.
However, my point was that just because a product/service (television, newspaper, magazine, streaming service, etc.) includes ads doesn't necessarily mean revenue from those ads is enough to fully pay for the product/service. A pay/ad hybrid model has been the norm for ages and is not something new to the "techno-greed" era.
Hajj.david
macrumors 6502a
artifex
macrumors 6502a
I remember when cable was touted as being commercial-free. And then, this new movie channel HBO was going to be commercial free during the movies, but you'd get commercials in between. That was ok, because people were using their VCRs and then Tivos and ReplayTVs to record the movies, and skip commercials. But then ReplayTV got sued over its ability to automatically skip commercials. And then, well, people were renting tapes, which had ads, and then DVDs, and then someone had the idea to rent DVDs out through the mail. Netflix wasn't first, but they were later one of the first streamers. And of course after the first few titles DVDs started having a bunch of ads, and then unskippable ads, and fast forward to Netflix sending out their custom DVDs of movies with Netflix ads...
I'm waiting for the next big thing to come out promising no ads, but it probably will have to use something other than TVs, because now the TVs have ads. The lighter AR glasses that eventually come out will probably end up having ads. But ads are inescapable even when you just walk around in public barefaced, even away from shop signs and billboards, as people wear clothing with overt logos and brand slogans. Some of which they pay extra for, to support their corporate-controlled tribal identity and announce they're somehow more important because they have more money to spend. Ads on clothes are pervasive enough that I've seen them on guests at weddings and funerals, and definitely in job interviews where job applicants try to signal they're serious and worth talking to because they already have money to spend on brands.
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