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Disney Raising Price of Disney+ Subscription to $10.99 and Launching $7.99 Ad-Supported Tier

seanmcbay said:
Poor Disney must be struggling. Surely they wouldn’t ever be greedy.
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When customer growth begins to slow, you jack up the prices.

That's how you keep growing even though no new customers walk in through the door.

This is a basic consumer business tenet that holds true across industries.
 
I honestly use my Disney+ and Hulu subscription about twice a month. And that's for Hulu for some TV show that it gets first which isn't even a huge bonus. Disney+ I barely touch. My kids are older now and I used to like what Disney produced but over past couple years I have become accustomed to hating them for so many reasons like price increases, bad ui in apps and so much more.
And I haven't even loaded ESPN onto my things & don't care so no loss with the bundle there either.

I'm definitely canceling. Crappy service with lackluster content. 99% of Disney's new content is not something I like and they completely ruined all of the Star Wars universe and will destroy Marvel content in upcoming years, you'll see. And I'm not ever going to rent or buy their bad movies through MY PAID PLUS SUBSCRIPTION that they then want to also put a $20+ charge on top of.

No thanks Disney. You are irrelevant and clueless & becoming more so every day. Not the Disney I grew up with.
 
ghboard2010 said:
$7.99 for ads!?!?!?!!!; no thank you, I'll save my $8/month, more money food{my greater priority}, and more gas for travelin' to get food. Somebody is buying the "not a recession kool-aid", good luck Dizzy+/-, hope it all crashes and burns as well it should.

If I want accept to 'ads', I'll get an antenna to pick-up local broadcasts, one cost for the damn arial and done with it.
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Sounds about right)
 
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kc9hzn said:
Both Disney+ and Netflix are hemorrhaging money, and the latter users, as well. I wonder how the other services are doing. Apple TV+ seems to be doing pretty well, between its now budget price point, shows gaining in popularity, its slow and steady pace of growth (instead of trying to capture millions of users right away and thousands of hours of content), and the Apple One bundle, and the fact that Apple can afford to invest in it for a pretty good length of time as it grows. Other than that, maybe Paramount+ and HBO Max are doing well? Peacock, it’s hard to say. I have to admit that I don’t watch anything on streaming these days, and Apple TV+ is the only one I subscribe to (as part of the Apple One bundle).
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Disney’s largest cost right now is producing content. It’s expected since they are trying to beef up their catalog.

Apple+ is serving as its niche for now. HBO Max is going thru turmoil consolidating with Discovery. Peacock we will have to see in 2024. It’s definitely not doing great right now
 
fel10 said:
With all these companies raising their prices, pretty soon we will be paying more than we used to pay for cable back in the day.
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Haven't most people been paying more for years? Unless you have very cheap internet, the price of your broadband connection, plus the price of one of the live TV services, plus all the streaming apps - blows way past what I used to pay for DirecTV or Comcast.
 
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D+ will probably just go into our rotation. Most streaming services we get for a month or two every 12-24 months, binge the things we care to watch then cancel.
 
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HobeSoundDarryl said:
You seem to be thinking Apple will spend the fortune for exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket and then not Apple profiteer that asset.

Think of it this way: did original Direct TV, then whoever bought them, then AT&T demand margins as high as Apple's for the TV service? And how much did Sunday Ticket cost as a service from those lower target margin players? Now think about Apple holding that exclusive lock. Is Apple not going to ask for AT LEAST as much as the historical fee for ST? And if that doesn't hit Apple's margin target, is it really hard to imagine them demanding even more?

Even if Apple leaves ST at its historical "extra" fee, that will leave $110/yr in the dust. 2021 ST was just shy of $300. I don't know if that had Apple's margin in it or not. I would guess NOT. Is Apple's exclusive on ST going to be $400/season? $500/season? At what price will it give Apple what it wants for bothering with it?
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Every little bit helps.
 
winxmac said:
THEN: one time payment
NOW: monthly subscription

THEN: pay once use forever
NOW: stop paying and you will no longer be able to use it

THEN: pay to get rid of ads
NOW: pay but you will still get ads
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For a lot of things, like apps or games, everyday services, I despise subscriptions. For entertainment like movies, TV and music, I don’t really care about owning them because I don’t feel the need to revisit them often or feel attached to owning the physical item. Music, the cost of one album a month would pay for a monthly music subscription with full access to almost all music.

When cable first came out it was to get rid of ads. Have you seen cable tv lately? They have entire channels dedicated to ads, ads on cable tv shows, ads in the menus. Its everywhere. At least with streaming services there is and ad free option.
 
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WestonHarvey1 said:
Haven't most people been paying more for years? Unless you have very cheap internet, the price of your broadband connection, plus the price of one of the live TV services, plus all the streaming apps - blows way past what I used to pay for DirecTV or Comcast.
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Maybe we are the odd ones, but we pay $80 a month for 1Gb up/down and don’t pay for any live/cable tv. Then we just pay for a streaming service here and there when there’s enough backlog of stuff to care about binging. We occasionally rent/buy a movie or TV show season when they are on sale, but that’s maybe 1-2 times a year I’d estimate.
 
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kc9hzn said:
Welcome, there are ones of us, I swear, ones of us! (Instead of tens, or hundreds, or thousands, to explain and thus ruin the joke.)

I feel like I got out of TV about 17 years ago. I was in school at the time and was involved in a lot of extracurriculars and advanced classes, and, at first, I hadn’t noticed myself watching less and less TV. I eventually noticed but didn’t care. Then 2008 hit and the writers’ strike made TV even less interesting to me, plus I was still busy with school. Eventually, I found myself with all the free time in the world (as it took me a year to find work after school) but no desire to watch anything on TV or go out of my way to change my schedule to watch other stuff. I did flirt with streaming during this period, which I consider the golden age of Netflix streaming. Also, I explored Hulu, which I found to have a decent selection of anime at the time. I had fallen out of anime some by that point but still enjoyed it enough to subscribe to Hulu for it. But eventually, even streaming lost its appeal to me.

Every year in May, after the networks have published the fall schedules, I look at the fall schedule announcements and the new shows, then decide “nah”. Sometimes I even wonder how long I’ll care about that ritual for before I just give up on TV. It’s all rehashes of the same ideas, the latest entry in cash cow franchises or the stumbling reanimated corpses of ideas that were better the first time around before I was born. (Though, disconcertingly, they’re starting to reuse concepts from my life time now! And it’s not just “the time window is shifting as I age, so those shows are retro now”, the window between original release and reboot is shrinking! Down to about 15 years or so for the worst cases.)
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I'm an old guy, so can remember only having 3 channels on the TV. I grew up reading tons and tons of books, riding my bicycle outside, and many times just doing nothing with friends. It definitely concerns me seeing my kids have thousands upon thousands of shows they can watch, that was one of the main drivers of my eventual exodus from television. Anyway 99.999999% of series these days are just soap operas, maybe they add zombies, or a spy scenario, but at the end of the day you get kind of tired of just watching the same old soap opera in a new setting.

One of the best purchases I ever made was Kindle e-readers for the entire family! Now in the evening instead of watching television, we all gather up on my king size bed and read our e-readers. We still enjoy a night or two per week of television, but this way it feels like a treat for the kids and not the norm.
 
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WestonHarvey1 said:
Haven't most people been paying more for years? Unless you have very cheap internet, the price of your broadband connection, plus the price of one of the live TV services, plus all the streaming apps - blows way past what I used to pay for DirecTV or Comcast.
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I don’t calculate the cost of internet into cost of streaming. Internet is a necessary utility that happens to also have use for entertainment purpose.
 
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spinedoc77 said:
I'm an old guy, so can remember only having 3 channels on the TV. I grew up reading tons and tons of books, riding my bicycle outside, and many times just doing nothing with friends. It definitely concerns me seeing my kids have thousands upon thousands of shows they can watch, that was one of the main drivers of my eventual exodus from television. Anyway 99.999999% of series these days are just soap operas, maybe they add zombies, or a spy scenario, but at the end of the day you get kind of tired of just watching the same old soap opera in a new setting.

One of the best purchases I ever made was Kindle e-readers for the entire family! Now in the evening instead of watching television, we all gather up on my king size bed and read our e-readers. We still enjoy a night or two per week of television, but this way it feels like a treat for the kids and not the norm.
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Like all things in life, it is about balance. Movies, TV and video games happens to be something my family enjoys greatly. We also read lots of books, ride bikes and play outside often. There is time in life to do all of it.
 
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Yep, this was inevitable, but for it to come so soon, especially in the midst of a pretty high inflationary period, this may become a turnoff to more and more people. I'm guessing we should expect them to keep raising the prices by as much as 30-40% each year going forward???

In the meantime, it appears that with all these price increases, all of us will simply need to make more and more money to be able to afford everything!....
 
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Devin Breeding said:
I don’t calculate the cost of internet into cost of streaming. Internet is a necessary utility that happens to also have use for entertainment purpose.
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I suppose you can look at it that way, unless you're upgrading your internet to support multiple 4K streams in the house. So part of that bill may count as a TV expense if you otherwise wouldn't have gone with the fastest plan.
 
ratspg said:
Who knows haha. The movies purchased span across Netflix, Disney+, hbo max, paramount plus, prime video, discovery+, peacock, lol.
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Yep… if someone really loves film, and isn’t just looking for cheap, light entertainment, disc really is the way to go. I can watch what I want, when I want, without worrying about subscribing to a zillion services or whether it’s in my streaming rotation that month. The only thing I’ve streamed this year is Stranger Things.

If you’re patient for sales, it’s usual cheaper than iTunes too. I paid $5 for a large portion of my collection. It helps that I like old stuff.
 
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I still remember Macrumours comments suggest Apple TV+ will annihilate Disney+.
 
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