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

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DDeepLogin about 5 hours ago 63 commentsRead Article on consumerrights.wiki

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Discussion (63 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

semiquaver•about 2 hours 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.

shakna•about 2 hours 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...

rubyfan•about 1 hour 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...

mrweasel•about 1 hour 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?

micromacrofoot•about 1 hour ago

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

fabian2k•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

> 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".

deathhand•about 2 hours ago

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.

matheusmoreira•31 minutes 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.

MarkWayneNewton•12 minutes ago

The seas are always open, friend.

ghusto•26 minutes ago

No it doesn't.

The changes are intended to cover the ads that are in pre-existing non-removable content. Nothing is changing, they're just making it clear that this is happening (or perhaps more unclear, judging by the response here).

lordleft•about 2 hours 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.

happytoexplain•about 2 hours 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.

sarchertech•about 1 hour 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.

mitxela•about 1 hour ago

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

mrweasel•about 1 hour 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?

kypro•about 1 hour 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.

laughing_man•about 2 hours 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.

usrbinbash•about 2 hours 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.

kuerbel•about 2 hours ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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...."

kuerbel•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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

fn-mote•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

ljf•about 2 hours 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.

jonathanlydall•about 2 hours ago

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•about 1 hour ago

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"

jamesnorden•about 2 hours ago

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

DarkNova6•about 2 hours 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.

throwaway85825•about 1 hour ago

They have a government granted temporary monopoly.

mitxela•about 1 hour ago

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

WesolyKubeczek•about 1 hour 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.

shevy-java•25 minutes ago

That's sad. I do not want my money to go into ads anywhere. I decided that for my own life, I can do well without propaganda, aka ads. I can not kill ads in reallife, e. g. if a poster shows this on some house, but I can most definitely get rid of it on the www, which I do. Ublock origin is the bare minimum (I can also use it via thorium actually, so via the adChrome code base, but I'd love to be able to de-google myself as well - the sooner the better. Sadly I still depend on Google too much, which does not make me happy. Now that Google ruined its search engine, though, I am looking for viable alternatives. The other search engines are really bad though, although I have increasingly noticed that I get different search results, e. g. qwant shows other things than Google, and in some cases better results using the same search query, which was interesting. Sooner or later I can completely abandon the crap that is modern google search).

voganmother42•about 1 hour ago

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

raffraffraff•about 1 hour ago

I love this use of the word "agreement"

Alifatisk•about 1 hour ago

Why am I even paying anymore.

oybng•about 1 hour ago

Stop. Giving. Them. Your. Money.

cynicalsecurity•about 2 hours ago

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

mitxela•about 1 hour ago

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