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Comments (400)

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  jerf
  From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.Assuming you even care about legality, of course.Yeah, it's harder. But you can get a lot of "harder" things done in the amount of time you otherwise spend watching ads, after all. Because to me one of the worst things about ads is they're stealing dollars from me to make cents, if not fractions of a cent. This makes them on the dumb end of the bandit classification by the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity metric: https://harmful.cat-v.org/people/basic-laws-of-human-stupidi... It's so dumb.And as long as we keep letting them give us an option to buy out the ads, but then they get to stick ads on that option anyhow, we can never get our way out of ads on these things. I don't mind buying them out because they make so little money anyhow but by simple game theory "buy out ads + put ads on anyhow" is always > "buy out ads". You need to cancel if they do this to you. I can't, because I don't have a Disney+ subscription. But you really need to. You need to turn the option into either "let us buy out the ads" or "lose the subscription" for them.
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  x187463
  I've always been frustrated by the intense focus the modern economy has on advertising. If I am interested in a product, I would much rather discover it by searching. Having advertisements forced upon me at every turn is a massive waste of resources (time and attention) given only a fraction of a percent of the products have any relevance to my life. I block every form of advertising I can reasonably block. If a company raises the friction sufficiently, I'll find a way around it. I'm mostly an amoral participant in the economy. I pay for YouTube, Disney, etc. but if they make giving them money an unpleasant experience, I have no qualms employing a usenet subscription and *arr stack to dodge the whole thing.
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  cainxinth
  This is not an option for everyone, but as someone who gave up TV several years ago (not entirely, just mostly), not feeling the draw of these platforms or having to put up with their costs and changes is really nice.TV is sort of like caffeine (another thing I gave up - though that one wasn't by choice, but required by my doctors) in that you cannot imagine yourself living without it and wouldn't want to. And the first few months of abstinence are genuinely very difficult.But eventually it gets easier, and then it gets completely easy, and then you actually feel as good or better than before. And once you finally become accustomed to it, you can't imagine going back to the old way.
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  thisislife2
  This is what happens when you don't have consumer rights protection.E.g. Paid for ad-free OTT viewing but commercials ‘appeared after a month’, man wins Rs 9,500 ( https://indianexpress.com/article/legal-news/paid-ad-free-ot... ):> Calling it a deficiency in service, the Hyderabad consumer commission ordered an OTT platform to refund Rs 1,499 and pay compensation to a subscriber after it introduced advertisements midway into his paid ad-free subscription.
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  bofaGuy
  This is pedantic. Disney is clarifying that live content will have ads. They are not Disney's ads they are network ads from that live channel, usually a 3rd party to Disney. This is seemingly because all of Hulu's features will be ported to the Disney+ app, including live TV and replays of live TV and so whatever ads are in that live content and playback will be there for everyone.Also, Hulu include content from other companies which require ads to be played and only offer the ad free experience on their own platform.Here is a more detailed write up on the actual changes. https://rentry.co/tbr2owcq
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  saalweachter
  What I want is a streaming service that operates as a consumer cooperative.Subscribers vote, elect a slate of directors who each get a fraction of the content-budget to spend as per their campaign promises. Licensing content, buying it in perpetuity, producing it themselves or funding some group of creators -- none of this "how can we milk customers more", and no more fruitless community campaigns to save a beloved series, you just need some critical mass of subscribers to vote for the guy whose platform is "I will keep making more seasons as fast as possible until the sun boils the ocean".
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  losvedir
  I'm trying to understand what this actually means. Here's Disney's page on the matter[0].I understand that sports will tend to have ads displayed in the stadium and so on, and that some show may feature characters drinking Pepsi rather than Coke because of an agreement. And I guess movies may have trailers. Is that the extent of it? If I get what feels like an obvious "ad" then we'll probably be canceling, but I guess I'm okay with those things that I mentioned.[0] https://help.disneyplus.com/article/disneyplus-ads
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  j-kent
  In the end, it all leads to advertising. This is just the basic business model in the US/World right now. Get enough eyeballs on your product, whether it's TV, social media, AI, the ditch on the side of the highway; then monetize it with ads. I don't understand why at this point anyone is surprised that a company like Disney would put ads every possible place, even their highest tier of streaming."But I specifically chose the highest option so I wouldn't see ads!" well, now you have the option to pay the highest tier to see less ads. For now. By paying for the highest tier, Disney knows you are a higher quality consumer with the most disposable income of all the users on that platform; that's exactly the users Disney can charge the most for advertising spend. From an exec's standpoint, why wouldn't you? sure, they'll lose some paying customers, but will probably make more in the short term at least, which is all that matters.
• Aissen
  Note: this article is from last month predates the answer from Disney: https://thedesk.net/2026/09/sources-disney-wont-run-ads-in-a...> two sources at Disney familiar with the change said the updated terms was intended to give Disney greater leeway to incorporate promotional spots for its other movies, TV shows and live events before and after content streams on Disney Plus, not traditional commercial spots.> The use of the word “advertising” was intended to help its terms of service remain consistent across regions where the streaming platform is available, including countries where promotional spots for its own shows and other content might be legally considered an advertisement, even if the spots are not promoting third-party products or services.> To that end, Disney’s plan is similar to what other streamers, including Paramount Plus, do with their platforms now. Paramount Plus has long streamed promotional spots for its own shows, movies and live events before content on its ad-free tier.Now I'll let you decide if you trust more what the PR person says or what is written in T&C.
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  baq
  I’ll cancel the moment I see the first ad. I’m likely not alone, but under no illusion that there are a lot of people like me, either.
• saxonww
  The language in the EU or UK agreement must be a lot different than the US agreement. When this was announced last month, I never saw the new subscriber agreement and have not seen ads outside of live TV. Our subscriber agreement was updated yesterday, and says:---k. Service Tiers With or Without Ads. We offer different Service Tiers, some with advertisements and some predominantly without. Service Tiers described as "no ads" or "ad-free" are generally free of commercial interruptions, with certain exceptions that may change from time to time, including where: (i) streaming rights or other limitations require certain Content to play with ads; or (ii) ads are served in certain live or linear Content or special events (and replays thereof). Additionally, "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tiers may contain limited promotional content, such as brief clips about the Bundles (including messages promoting an upgrade thereto) and other content available on any services associated with the Bundles, and branded content, product integrations, or sponsorship messaging.Please note that if you subscribe to multiple (or a bundle of) Service Tiers, Content from any ad-supported Service Tier will play with ads, while Content from any "no ads" or "ad-free" Service Tier will not (except as described above).---So it's not quite as awful as what's reported here. This article is a month old and I haven't seen what it says was going to happen.
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  scrumper
  Andor really was an outlier, wasn't it? It's up there with the Sopranos and the Wire as one of the best TV shows in my lifetime, and everything else they make is lukewarm garbage soup.
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  bicepjai
  How is this a good decision? Curious what the C-suite discussion looked like. When customers lose every option they thought they were paying for, why would they stay on your platform instead of going back to free YouTube. I understand the argument of Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars, but I can only afford so much :) Thanks, HN I just cancelled.
• PaulHoule
  There's a contradiction in the "higher priced tier is ad-free" model which is that there are two kinds of people: (1) people who can't afford the ad-free tier who can't afford anything else and (2) people who could afford the ad-free tier who are worth advertising to.It's been the reality of media business models for a long time, like those big thick magazines like Glamour charged a high subscription price to qualify subscribers as people who can buy what's advertised. It's also one of the many reasons why I have distaste for The New York Times -- it is packed with low quality ads that discredit the quality of their editorial content. They're so greedy that an expensive subscription isn't enough, but the expensive subscription, in itself, improves the viability of the advertising model.
• causesothere
  A famous and well loved Disney Princess once said, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."Seems germane here.
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  peezd
  Netflix has done a good job demonstrating customers will complain but won't cancel, so not super surprised by this.
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  nwallin
  The world is so dumb.When I was young, I pirated because I was broke. I could afford a DVD or I could afford to eat that week. Food usually won. Sometimes alcohol.I got a decent job, and could afford to spend on things, but I still pirated because it was more convenient than going to a store I wouldn't ordinarily go to.Then netflix started streaming movies/TV to the home and I stopped pirating basically instantly. Netflix was more convenient than pirating. Steam started getting good, so I stopped pirating games as well.Then streaming service got balkanized. It wasn't enough to pay for Netflix anymore. I am expected to pay for literally half a dozen services, and when I do want to watch something, I would have to flip around between half of them before I find the right service to stream it from. And now they expect me to watch ads?Fuck that. I still buy games on Steam and GoG because it's convenient. I pirate TV/movies because it's such a fucking pain in the dick to consume that media legally. I just can't be bothered when piracy is so much more convenient.
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  charlesabarnes
  I find it extremely repugnant how _everything_ gets treated like advertising surface area now. Its disrespectful to everyone and I feel like we're far past the point of diminishing returns.
• hn_submit
  When you pay $22 a month for an ad-free tier you expect it to be free from promotional content or trailers as well. Disney is going to be hurtin' big time in the coming year as subscribers leave in droves.
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  Aboutplants
  The only reason I have Disney is because I have a young child and there are a couple of shows that they enjoy. We recently got rid of Netflix because there is literally nothing of interest to anyone in the household and the only reason we currently have Hulu is because of Jeopardy.They keep seeking the price to where consumers are finally pushed to the limit and I think they are almost there, finally
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  233mhz
  Teach your kids how to garden, shoot guns and torrent
• red-iron-pine
  welp time to cancel i guessi gave up on sailing the seas years ago but at these rates i can pay for decent seedboxen and vpns
• aaronbrethorst
  lol, I pre-paid for an annual subscription when Disney+ first launched: Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar together was a compelling offering. I canceled after year 2, and rejoined when I got an offer to pay $5/month for the ads tier this past November. I'll be canceling in a couple weeks when that deal expires.My four year old hates ads ("too many commercials," he says), and with the continuous price increases and his...mercurial media diet, it's actually easier and cheaper for me to just buy DVDs or Blu Ray discs.So, farewell Disney+. I'm perfectly happy to go back to discs—they're actually a better user experience than anything you choose to offer.
• zug_zug
  We can talk about TV all we want -- but the answer is youtube (and no not youtubeTV or whatever). We're seeing entirely free shows better than what you'd get on netflix (e.g. The Amazing digital circus) and a few orders of magnitude more content.It's TV "2.0" (meaning decentralized creators no gatekeepers) and the younger generations are watching it far more than anything else (and producing impressive content)
• ivanmontillam
  Disney is primed up for some regulatory action and customer punishment.Enough cancellations will trigger price raises to protect their quarter reports until the whole revenue model collapses, and they price themselves out of the streaming subscription business.I am not an MBA, but it made sense to me.
• tetris11
  Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of RAM.
• blks
  Funny that this linked website has shit ton of ads every single paragraph. It’s like the worst kind of cooking website.
• bofaGuy
  This is mostly misleading. Here is a detailed write up on the actual changes and what they mean.https://rentry.co/tbr2owcq
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  gnarlouse
  Who even cares let this dumpsterf*k company die of its own greedy accord Disney hasn't been worth a cent of mental energy in a long time. Adieu.
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  DiabloD3
  Thats a weird way for Disney+ to go under.
• Melatonic
  So glad I cancelled years agoWeren't they the ones that said they would never have ads when they first released ?They're already one of the worst with advertisements mid show and one of the worst catalogues.
• johsole
  Thank you Disney!This was exactly the push I needed to cancel my subscription. We already own all the Disney DVDs that we actually love, and there hasn't been anything good released by Disney in ages.
• LaurensBER
  Given how good illegal alternatives like Stremio are this seems like a very dangerous game to play.You can squeeze customers quite a bit but once they go back to pirating it's incredible hard to get them to subscribe again.
• sailfast
  The real answer here is regulation around advertising, as well as regulation around appropriate size of media companies.Scale is not required anymore to launch streaming platforms - white label works fine - and for the most part these major services sell property rights back and forth anyway every few months to keep you subscribed.It’s pure cartel / oligopoly behavior. Can’t imagine this gets better since Ellison owns HBO and Paramount services.
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  rhipitr
  I lived abroad for a while in a country I didn’t initially speak the language in. One thing I clearly remember is feeling quite different because advertising literally had no effect on me since I couldn’t understand it.
• drob518
  They’re just going to keep changing the terms, injecting more ads, and raising prices until their revenue falls. As long as the number keeps going up, they’ll keep doing it.
• ricardobeat
  How high can it go? It's already €16/month over here for 4K. This is getting into cable channel territory, except it had a lot more variety.
• everdrive
  Maybe people will eventually catch on? All services will eventually be modified to make things worse for you. Always, 100% of the time.
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  4dregress
  If you live in the UK Lloyds bank give it to you for free.There isn’t really anything good on there, they don’t have AAA series.
• nothercastle
  Looks like I’ll never subscribe to Disney then
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  HeavyStorm
  I subscribe to Disney when I want to see something specific and then immediately unsubscribe once I'm finished.
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  commiepatrol
  It boggles my mind that people pay for streaming when there are ample amounts of pirated sites that you can just stream from, you don't even have to download anything anymore.
• crazybonkersai
  I cancelled a shared Disney subscription when they started cracking down on accounts shared between different households. Same with Netflix and HBO. Now I torrent everything using Transmission, Sonarr and Plex stack and couldn't be happier. UX is on par with paid services and don't have to deal with this ads bullshit. Paid streaming was nice while it lasted, but now torrents seem like a much better alternative.
• gumby
  This enshittification and degradation of language (“ad-free”) is not surprising — it’s the same path cable TV followed.But I struggle to understand the economics of the streaming sites listed in the article. They receive an all-you-can-eat monthly payment but have to keep acquiring (including, it seems, making) new content. The linkage between the two is very loose (monthly vs daily) and most videos etc show up as new and then fade down the rankings. Seems like a pretty crappy business, and Netflix being independent, points towards that in its financial statements.Also, the existence of this sentence in the article surprised me: “ It doesn’t help that Disney+ doesn’t make the kind of original content that wins at the Emmys.” Winning a major one can have a small boost on a film’s lifetime revenue, but overall the correlation between the two is weak. To paraphrase (ugh) Pournelle: Disney would rather have a lucrative film with no awards than a lauded film with no revenue.
• ted_bunny
  Tubi has ads, but it doesn't BS you about it. I'll take a fair taxman over a boutique swindler any day.
• pfdietz
  I'm just ignoring this sort of mass entertainment media.
• honeycrispy
  I cancelled my Peacock subscription the day Curious George got taken off. It was the only thing my daughter watched.I went to best buy, bought their Sony blu-ray player and a 128GB USB stick, went to Walmart and raided their $5 DVD bin, downloaded a bunch of old children's content from archive.org onto the jump drive, put it in the blu-ray player, and now my children have more quality content than they could ever want to watch. I recommend any parent do this instead of paying for streaming, the experience is 1,000x better.No more streaming subscriptions. I'm done with the corporate greed.
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  beastman82
  there is nothing stopping anyone from canceling. They make an offer, you are free to refuse it
• Vaushite
  Piracy is morally correct.
• karussell
  I'm okay with paying but I really hate ads with a passion and especially for kids this is not okay. I was a customer of Disney and I guess I'll never be one again.What alternatives exists for kids? Youtube?
• unixhero
  Time to hit the high seasons
• supermanav
  Time to sail the seas.
• blue_green_maps
  (September 19, 2026)?
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  damnesian
  Corporatism is running rampant. It's almost a full-blown punishment model. Soon the entertainment platforms will be demanding a fee for NOT subscribing to their service.
• glerk
  It’s a sign of the universe you should stop wasting your time on these moronic endeavors (and paying for them on top of it).
• bityard
  Delicious irony that the site this is being reported on pops up a dialog over the content as you scroll down, with the following disclaimer:> We use your personal data for interest-based advertising, as outlined in our Privacy Notice.Sigh, this isn't the timeline I was hoping to end up in.
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  dorianmariecom
  back to the pirate bay
• chaostheory
  I would be more up in arms if this wasn't mainly for sports events for the premium tier.
• anon
  undefined
• dyauspitr
  Why exactly does making a show or a movie cost millions of dollars where is that money going? Youtubers have been able to pull off insane full length documentary and movies and stuff with very little capital.
• sailfast
  They choose piracy, then. Ok!
• spl757
  mumble mumble usenet mumble mumble
• nalekberov
  Settings->CancelAs easy as drinking water.
• ChrisArchitect
  Story from September OP;Lots of discussion then:Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptionshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784336Disney+ and Hulu raise prices by up to 13 percent after doubling profitshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49831774
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  zackmorris
  Advertising is money laundering.The news is a front for the wealthy to control the political narrative so they can pass laws to benefit themselves. Home improvement networks are fronts for real estate developers. Sports channels are fronts for bookies and merchandisers. And so on and so forth.Web-based services like streaming are now a front for oligopolies. Or more accurately, maybe they always have been, at least since the Dot Bomb around 2000. But who are we kidding, the 1950s were literally a false narrative about the nuclear family vs the rabble, used to create the Cold War and skim trillions of dollars from the working poor on both sides of the conflict.This stuff used to be the cynical conspiratorial view. But now I don't see how kids will be able to navigate the modern world without someone admitting what they already know: that it's all a lie.
• Kapura
  ...And I still can't buy Andor Season 2 on blu-ray. coincidence?
• scotty79
  Didn't cable TV have ads? And if so, why would anone expect this to not have them?
• vuldin
  The US executive branch should look into Disney for their part in bringing back piracy.
• ferongr
  Not only you'll be paying for low quality Disney slop, but you'll also be paying to be advertised to. I now think even less of people that keep paying for subscriptions like Disney+.
• GolfPopper
  They were actually doing this already. When you bought the premium plan, they just lied and pretended their in-house ads weren't ads and served you those instead. You still didn't get to just watch the content you wanted.
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  htk
  I have YouTube premium and it now shoves a "products" panel in my face that I have to swipe down before a video starts if the video references a product.The enshittification knows no bounds.
• nelsonfigueroa
  Corporations are yet again making piracy look very appealing.
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  HelloMcFly
  I just want a company to tell me truly what it is worth to them from me to not show me ads. Maybe the cost is truly so much higher than I expect that I wouldn't pay it, but for fuck's sake give me the option! Is it $15/month extra instead of $5? $30/month extra? Somewhere, that line exists where the company would financially benefit, I just wish they'd actually define it.When I was getting married, I engaged a baker to make pies for our wedding. Two weeks before the wedding they cancelled, saying very apologetically they had not catered many weddings with only pies and couldn't do it at the price they quoted. I had to practically beg them to just give me a price that was profitable for them (20% higher, in the end), and then let me decide. This feels just like that.
• throwawalien
  I set up a server with the radarr/sonarr/requestrr/jellyfin suite and haven't looked back. basically only pay for YouTube premium at the moment.
• dude250711
  Fund the amazing things they respectfully do to your favourite franchises!
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  vlyan
  what do people with these subscriptions even watch? why can these services make any money at all when there's youtube and tiktok with infinite content for every niche interest in existence? what compels people to still consume mass produced slop?
• seane
  can anyone else see the AI-writing in this article? It's so unpleasant...
• lenerdenator
  It really does amaze me how much people are willing to put up with from streaming apps.Like I get it if your kid wants to watch Disney shows and it buys you some peace and quiet. Otherwise, it's a firehose of content, everything's ultimately just a part of a franchise structure that's built more as a business plan than a piece of art, and there's no way to consume it all.
• micromacrofoot
  where are all the "just because they put it in their terms doesn't mean they'll do it everywhere" people from the original story
• anon
  undefined
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  kstenerud
  [flagged]