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

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DDeepLogin about 5 hours ago 90 commentsRead Article on consumerrights.wiki

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Analyzed from 3352 words in the discussion.

Discussion (90 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.

DonsDiscountGas•30 minutes 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?

Gareth321•14 minutes 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.

jmathai•18 minutes 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 add 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.

semiquaver•11 minutes 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, easy as that.

cogman10•1 minute ago

Anyone that doesn't see the obvious play here probably wasn't alive when cable was the "ad free" tv option.

These media companies cannot help themselves. Advert money is very tantalizing and they'll always want to find ways to sneak it in whenever and wherever they can.

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...

echelon•43 minutes 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

gruez•32 minutes ago

The original lawsuit was spurious to begin with because the restaurant wasn't even operated by Disney.

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?

exe34•16 minutes 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.

josefresco•22 minutes 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.

ChrisRR•8 minutes ago

I read it more as a contract issue rather than a technical issue

scotty79•19 minutes 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.

ChrisRR•10 minutes ago

> I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.

This fight was lost at least a decade ago. Everything must now be a constant source of outrage

reptileIllumina•20 minutes ago

Advertising is just a front for the surveillance capitalism/state and the one of foundation to the digital prison system. Of course they want ads on your devices.

amelius•43 minutes ago

Why can't they remove the embedded ads with AI?

Sheesh ... they're a big company. This should be easy.

TeMPOraL•31 minutes ago

They could. They won't, because those ads are probably - if you excuse a little Claudish - the load-bearing part of the contract that allows them to show the content in the first place.

(More cynical take: the ads are the whole point, the content itself is just a vector to get those ads in front of people, and prime them to be receptive.)

basisword•22 minutes ago

If you're talking about sports stuff:

1. Now you just have a blank screen. Sure some people might like that but others will think there's an issue with the stream.

2. They're purchasing the rights to show the sports stuff, not actually producing it themselves and removing the ads would make the cost of the rights astronomical.

Even when expensive linear TV packages were the norm, they still came with ads. With live TV paying has never negated the need for ads.

oivey•16 minutes ago

1. There doesn’t have to be a blank screen. Major League Baseball’s streaming service, for example, plays highlights or a placeholder video saying a commercial break is in progress.

2. What? They own ESPN which is producing the content, right?

Baseball literally has an ad-free tier for its live streaming service. I’m sure it’s not the only live service that does.

None of your points seem well considered. Why run interference for these companies?

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. The goldfish grows to fit its bowl.

GuB-42•26 minutes ago

That's why I don't really care that much about terms and conditions. Just because they say they can doesn't mean that they will, conversely, the writing can be misleading to anyone who isn't a specialized lawyer, so most people can't really tell what the terms and condition let them do anyways.

I usually go for reputation and precedent rather then legalese. And in the case of Disney, they had ads in their video tapes and DVDs, so I don't need to read the user agreement to know that it has a good chance to come to Disney+, whatever the legal pathway is.

mitxela•44 minutes ago

They don't stop at terms and laws. They stop at what loses money, through customer churn or lawsuits.

mohamedkoubaa•8 minutes ago

Typically the only restraining force is a founder who cares.

mosura•3 minutes ago

Who they will paint as an asshole in order to get them ejected.

And it will be true because the only way to defeat these people is actually being an asshole.

micromacrofoot•3 minutes ago

there are execs and product people that care, but it's rare and they often get worn out

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.

hibikir•21 minutes ago

In most of these cases, you will see a place like D+ carry the same announcers as the TV station. Here Inbet it would be ESPN crews. So having a different, special crew just for ad breaks would not be exactly great. And given the density of ads in, say, the Super Bowl, you would be hard pressed making this a good experience.

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".

cyanydeez•20 minutes ago

Guys, guys, tthe cook only turned the boil up a degree or two, ypu cant even feel it!

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•33 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•15 minutes ago

The seas are always open, friend.

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.

happytoexplain•32 minutes ago

Those cases are high-profile, and much more common than they should have been, but not common in the context of all products. They are examples of the type of decision-making that I am claiming has increased across the board. Also, those cases are mostly enormous-harm-vs-enormous-profit, whereas now that the same attitude is everywhere, most of the cases are just "make the thing worse", which is way less dramatic but ten thousand times more common.

malfist•43 minutes ago

Whoa there, next you're going to tell me government action can benefit society

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.

scotty79•12 minutes ago

It's almost as if making companies responsible for performance of their stock backfired to the tune of "a measure that becomes the goal ceases to be a good measure".

zmgsabst•18 minutes ago

I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.

matheusmoreira•27 minutes 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.

scotty79•14 minutes ago

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?

mitxela•43 minutes ago

No, why should they have pride? Having pride is more expensive than not having it, and the ones with pride have been naturally selected out of the market. The people making the movies don't care either, haven't you seen all the complaints about Hollywood becoming a slop factory?

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.

Quothling•33 minutes ago

I think this might be a miscalculation on disney's behalf unless they don't turn it on, on the childrens profiles. Like, I'll watch 5 sections of gaming adds on the last episode of reacher because I'm too cheap to pay the extra 29 dkr before I cancel my subscription anyway, but I canceled Disney the monent they added the advertising to things my children were watching. It wasn't even real advertising, just testing the waters where they'd put a 40ish second add for one of their own movies that you could skip, but I don't want that for my children.

I doubt I'm unique.

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...."

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.

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.

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.

kuerbel•about 1 hour ago

That is not at all supported by evidence though. You might do that but it's an anecdote.

E.g this survey: https://www.nexttv.com/news/a-hit-driven-biz-40-of-consumers...

"40% of Consumers Sign Up For an SVOD Service to Watch a Specific Show"

Or this Ipsos survey:

https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-235725

[...]almost 4 in 10 (38%) agree that they often subscribe to a channel to watch a specific show[...]

nyeah•11 minutes ago

The agreement isn't my main focus. If I see ads, that's obviously a much lower level of service. I may pay short-term if there's special content, but I'm not going to just hang around paying.

It doesn't matter to me whether the ads are deliberate, or whether some providers are somehow "unable" to control their ads.

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.

le-mark•33 minutes 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.

basisword•19 minutes 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.

ghusto•28 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).

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.

usef-•18 minutes ago

Didn't cable have ads too?

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

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

ymolodtsov•23 minutes ago

Except you can cancel it from the next month with a few clicks.

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.

fuzzfactor•28 minutes 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.

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"

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

shevy-java•27 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).

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