Disney+ has updated its subscriber agreement to allow advertising before and after movies and shows across every subscription tier. The change quietly ends completely ad-free streaming on the platform, even for those paying top dollar.
That includes the Premium plan, which costs $18.99 a month and was originally sold on the promise of an uninterrupted viewing experience.
Subscribers now face an on-screen prompt when logging in, requiring them to actively accept the updated terms before they can keep watching.
I feel scammed.
I always bought DVDs to avoid ads and that was nice, then they made streaming more affordable and convenient.
Then they quietly dropped releasing streaming shows on physical media and now it’s more expensive and has ads.
You tricked me!
I remember physical VHS and DVDs also had a lot of advertisement back in the day. Self marketing for different movies, releases etc
Those are fun and dated now. The streaming services won’t leave anything after the profit is gone.
At least with VHS you could fast forward past the FBI notice and ads. Unskippable DVD ads was why I never thought badly about torrents.
Unskippable DVD ads
Rip it and burn a backup without the ads?
That is the way
You could also get players that ignored the can’t skip flag.
Did You know that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day?
Where did the frugal pirate get his hook?
Tap for spoiler
At the secondhand store!
(on a completely unrelated note)
Corporate enshittification accelerates and Disney is leading the way.
They’re really speedrunning it. Alas, I expected nothing less.
Wait didn’t Prime and Netflix do this already? After Hulu and YouTube went nuts with ads?
Disney sucks but seems like this is one of the last to ad ads.
IIRC, netflix did it only for a few plans
Allows is doing a lot of heavy lifting
The are deliberately adding ads
Sounds like a class action lawsuit based on false promises is in order
There was one when amazon did the same. In favor of amazon…
I think the dumbfuck judge said it was merely ‘modification of benefits, so it doesnt count’, or some shit along those lines. This probably the reason why more companies do it now.
You probably agree to changes like this when you sign up. You wouldn’t purposely agree to it but they write it that way and it stands up in court.
This is why regulation paired with antitrust enforcement is important, which hasn’t existed in any meaningful sense in the US since before Reagan. Healthy competion would drastically lessen the likelihood of such anti-consumer practices.
Businesses with high barrier to entry naturally will have fewer competitors(airlines, cell networks, etc.) and so need healthy regulation, or preferably nationalization.
WE HAVE ALTERED THE AGREEMENT
PRAY WE DO NOT ALTER IT FURTHER
[heavy breathing]
haha that’s so fitting
Bespin was the original enshittification, a long time ago and a galaxy far away
Fucking what? Well, cancel away and then Google the letters at the start of this sentence
Fucking Mouse, He’s Yucky
People are such sheeple
“Ad-free” has always been bullshit because every steamer runs ads for their own content at the start/end of everything and has giant “WATCH NEXT” “COMING SOON” “TRENDING NOW” banners on every screen.
Yeah. All the companies seem to think that ads for their own products don’t count as ads. Same with all these ad free mobile games…. 99% of them show ads for in game purchases.
I think that the bullshit mental gymnastics that they all went through to allow them to do that was to call them promotions, not ads.
Promotions are less annoying but still annoying.
“Hey heres a show thats popular with people who also watched what you watched, maybe you will too IDK.” Isnt as grating as “Have you considered going into 70k of debt for an oversized truck you dont need?” Every 10 minutes.
If I read the article correctly, that’s exactly what they’re talking about. Promo prerolls.
Was only using Disney and pirated the rest. Now we will be pirating every damn thing just like I did 20 years ago. Fuck any service that will not give you the option to pay for ad free.
Removed by mod
Have you build your own server? Or did you buy a NAS?
I bought a shell of a supermicro super storer, put ATX components in it, and outfitted it with 8x 10 TB drives in ZFS RAID Z2.
I have to 50 TB of storage and I can scale to 200 TB relatively easily. Streaming services are gone in my household.
I’m using a 2019 Dell SFF (Small Form Factor) desktop. It idles around 20 watts with max power of 80 watts, which is important. My old desktop idled at 100 watts.
This machine has no trouble doing everything I need for a media server. It’s running VMware ESXi, with multiple VM’s. One VM is for the Jellyfin server, one is the file server, one is a video conversion/DVD ripper/CD ripper, etc.
While ripping DVD’s and converting videos, that box still has no problem serving multiple video streams for Jellyfin.
It really takes so little to stream, especially if you work toward limiting transcoding. Still, even when transcoding I don’t run into performance bottlenecks.
Out of curiosity, why are VMs, streaming or transcoding needed? I’ve always just accessed and played the movie files directly from the media center PC via some form of ssh or nfs. Even works from my phone on the go with a Wireguard VPN. Have I been missing out on something?
Guess it depends on what you have on your server. Streaming a Blu-ray movie in full quality to your phone might not be the most desirable thing to do… so you can watch the full “non-compressed” movie at home on the big screen and have a smaller version served to your phone.
See ye on the high seas, matey! Arrr.
Drink up me ‘earties, yo ho!
Some republican politicians are actually trying to push a legislation to require ISPs and VPN providers and whatever to block “foreign pirating sites”. I know there will always be a way for those who know what they’re doing, but they’re squeezing people little by little into having to pay these subscriptions no matter what companies do. I’ll personally just quit watching tv altogether if I had no choice but to pay these fuckers. I have zero subscriptions and I’d like to keep it that way.
My public library still checks out DVDs. Some titles are blu-rays even. Get an optical drive and rip away. For free.
True that. I use both, Kanopy and physical from the library. I have a 42TB HPE server that has a ton of content. If it ever dies to where I can’t revive it anymore and all pirating sites are blocked, I’m fucking going back to the old days of dvd/blu-ray players. I will get me one of those portable ones like I had before and start watching. I’ll never pay them a fucking dollar.
This in particular makes me miss rental stores. Should have gotten into ripping twenty years ago.
Don’t forget thrift stores, you can get old media there super cheap and some thrift stores support good causes so you still aren’t giving money to the shitty companies but you are helping the thrift store survive and helping someone that needs it to keep a job.
Omfg, thank you so much for bringing that up. Totally forgot about this. Definitely first on the list.
My owned library is thousands of libraries. I’m with you, I’m checking out of current media if they want me to watch ads.
Imagine if people just stopped paying these companies. I guarantee you that most people have more entertainment than they can consume in their lifetime. They just want to have everything and these companies know it.
Also they could just pirate it if they wanted something new.
Sail the seas 🏴☠️
Glad I have kept my 1000+ dvd/bluray movie collection, given the way streaming has become nothing but fricken ads
