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.
Aren't even the "high quality" 4k streams like 15GB/movie? So at $20/TB that's ~$0.30/movie at streaming quality? And you could still have probably better than DVD quality that people used to pay $20 for for like ~2GB, or $0.04.
We can just move on as a society from Disney. It didn't exist in 1900, no reason for it to exist now. It doesn't deserve a permanent place in western culture.
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
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.
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.
After setting up a nas + sonarr setup, it's amazing how much my tv usage went down, simply due to having to actually choose what to view before it appears on my tv.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
I haven't had a functional TV in my home for over 5 years now. I will sometimes watch shows on my laptop but that's about it.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
I try Qobuz out every year but my dumb niche music tastes aren't as available there.I hope they continue to grow because I love the idea of leaving Spotify.
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.
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".
> 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.
Well, if you want the root cause: this is what happens when your society is predicated on perpetual growth. Everything would collapse if we just left good things alone, so instead we’re stuck either innovating and creating new good things or squeezing the juice out of what already exists.
This has nothing with perpetual growth and everything with training your population to defend these practices with "oh, they're just companies, don't use it if you don't like it!" instead of fighting back.
I'm not sure consumer rights protections would deliver better experiences.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this:
1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch
2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses
3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
--------
Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
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.
It's unclear why you're arguing for this. We already know about the downsides of low-regulation capitalism. They're still downsides, and we may reasonably continue to talk about them as such.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
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.
I remember when I had Amazon Prime ad-free tier. Then they added ads to the ad-free tier, and then I found out to get what I was already paying for, they now want $36 more per year. I mean, that's just blatant bait and switch.
It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"
Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.
Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.
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.
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.
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.
I think the best move is now to go back to watching TV: more broad access to channels, also has ads which are (to some degree) skippable. I do not get why streaming had to go full way to being worse than TV.
You can buy pretty much any show you want to watch, without ad breaks, anytime you want on Apple TV store and Google Play store.
The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.
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.
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.
Yeah this is kind of monopoly power maybe - it’s not that they make $50/year extra from showing you ads, it’s that if the provide the option to skip ads it devalues their remaining advertising by $millions and so they need to force everyone to watch them.
If there was proper competition the log jam would get broken and it might be possible to just pay the incremental cost of what you viewing ads is worth.
This information is available in the annual reports of all these companies. It's the advertising revenue per user per year. For Meta it's like $100 a year for U.S. users.
It's not easy to calculate how much you are worth because it depends on so many factors. And it wouldn't be nice to charge you 10x more than what they charge someone else.
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.
No, it IS a full-blown punishment model. Remember, everyone else is bundling this garbage with their service, too, so the price raises Disney does is an excuse that forces everyone downstream that bundles to raise prices too.
I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.
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.
> From this point on, every year "physical media & a Jellyfin install" is going to be more sensible.
Which of course is why physical media will increasingly rarely be offered as an option going forward
See SONY pulling out of the Blu-ray player market.
Also, if you're willing to buy them out, they're going to rais the coat until you're no longer willing.
You can only win by unsubscribing.
The cost of hardware may be what kills my local Jellyfin install.
Physical media is being done away with, both discs and players.
Seems like streaming is the future we are going to be fed.
Aren't even the "high quality" 4k streams like 15GB/movie? So at $20/TB that's ~$0.30/movie at streaming quality? And you could still have probably better than DVD quality that people used to pay $20 for for like ~2GB, or $0.04.
We can just move on as a society from Disney. It didn't exist in 1900, no reason for it to exist now. It doesn't deserve a permanent place in western culture.
Only possible if you are fine missing an arbitrary 1/3 of live sports events.
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
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.
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.
Another benefit is you don’t have a permanent black hole on the wall. You no longer have to force the room layout to focus on that space.
After setting up a nas + sonarr setup, it's amazing how much my tv usage went down, simply due to having to actually choose what to view before it appears on my tv.
And it's also apparent how little content is currently worth a conscious watch. Every year or so I make a quick check for what great things appeared in the period, and not much has popped up.
It's always the feeds themselves that get you.
I haven't had a functional TV in my home for over 5 years now. I will sometimes watch shows on my laptop but that's about it.
In place of a TV I have a high res audio transport and speakers that are used for music. Spotify isn't exactly a saint but it would be challenging for them to do what Disney is doing without losing all their customers.
Try Qobuz. We switched off Spotify over a year ago and it's been better in every way.
I try Qobuz out every year but my dumb niche music tastes aren't as available there.I hope they continue to grow because I love the idea of leaving Spotify.
...what ? TV was always ass, imagine WAITING for show to start and planning your day around it just to get ads every 15 minutes.
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.
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".
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.
Well, if you want the root cause: this is what happens when your society is predicated on perpetual growth. Everything would collapse if we just left good things alone, so instead we’re stuck either innovating and creating new good things or squeezing the juice out of what already exists.
This has nothing with perpetual growth and everything with training your population to defend these practices with "oh, they're just companies, don't use it if you don't like it!" instead of fighting back.
I'm not sure consumer rights protections would deliver better experiences.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
We are seeing an increasingly exaggerated cycle that goes like this: 1. Innovation takes huge investment to launch 2. Early adopters enjoy amazing new product(s) while companies bear losses 3. Companies eventually must face debt so quality of products decrease and price increases
OpenAI and Anthropic have perhaps set the record for going from 1 to 2 in the biggest (financially) and fastest manner ever, and we are all hurtling towards step 3 with a possible too-big-to-fail scenario.
Back to Disney Plus: I don't have a sagely answer. Free markets do sometimes need government to curb monopoly power, and Disney is certainly has a sort of monopolistic power due to their huge portfolio of franchises and content.
The "government is bad at it's job" crowd showing up after murdering the formerly very effective government....
The US did actually once have effective consumer protections, they were killed by a billionaire because he hated taxes and brown people.
Government is predictably slow, inefficient, and does just about everything at a service level that is only accepted because there is no other choice.
--------
Generally true but there have been a lot of examples demonstrating the opposite.
The NPS (and Reacreation.gov) does an amazing job considering their resource level, NASA arguably delivered innovation at an unprecedented scale for decades, and up until it was purposefully fucked with the US Postal Service offered a fantastic dependable, affordable and pretty innovative product. The Hold Mail is simple and elegant as just one minor example.
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.
It's unclear why you're arguing for this. We already know about the downsides of low-regulation capitalism. They're still downsides, and we may reasonably continue to talk about them as such.
There's a whole genre of comment like this where the implication is that if some effect is either predictable or inevitable by the nature of large in-place systems, then individuals are somehow not allowed to criticize the people choosing to enact the effects.
We all have free will. Just because you can legally make money being annoying or otherwise shitty, and if you didn't do it then somebody else would, that carries absolutely no implication that nobody is allowed to judge you for making that choice.
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.
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.
I remember when I had Amazon Prime ad-free tier. Then they added ads to the ad-free tier, and then I found out to get what I was already paying for, they now want $36 more per year. I mean, that's just blatant bait and switch.
It's some criminal gangster saying "hey that's a nice free ad-tier, shame if something happened to it. Listen, you pay me $36/year for protection, and all this goes away. Capice?"
Remember when the appeal was that streaming was cheaper than cable? So, yeah. Shareholders were not going to just take that lying down when they know what can squeeze their consumers far harder than they anticipated.
Plus, they are now removing movies that you have "bought" or "purchased" while offering NO refunds.
"If buying isn't owning, pirating isn't stealing" -Cory Doctorow
Wow, all of this happening right as I'm building a Plex competitor!
Keep your eyes peeled for Orpheum when it comes out of closed beta in a month.
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.
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.
Netflix has done a good job demonstrating customers will complain but won't cancel, so not super surprised by this.
Maybe people will eventually catch on? All services will eventually be modified to make things worse for you. Always, 100% of the time.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of RAM.
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.
How else can we possibly make stock market number go up quarter after quarter?
(September 19, 2026)?
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.
I think the best move is now to go back to watching TV: more broad access to channels, also has ads which are (to some degree) skippable. I do not get why streaming had to go full way to being worse than TV.
You can buy pretty much any show you want to watch, without ad breaks, anytime you want on Apple TV store and Google Play store.
The only one that requires you to subscribe is Netflix, but it's also easy to cancel the subscription, so you can simply pay for 1 month as the price to watch a show.
Fund the amazing things they respectfully do to your favourite franchises!
Thats a weird way for Disney+ to go under.
can anyone else see the AI-writing in this article? It's so unpleasant...
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.
mumble mumble usenet mumble mumble
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.
If you would pay to remove ads you are more valuable, so they can charge more, in a never ending spiral.
Yeah this is kind of monopoly power maybe - it’s not that they make $50/year extra from showing you ads, it’s that if the provide the option to skip ads it devalues their remaining advertising by $millions and so they need to force everyone to watch them.
If there was proper competition the log jam would get broken and it might be possible to just pay the incremental cost of what you viewing ads is worth.
> Somewhere, that line exists where the company would financially benefit, I just wish they'd actually define it.
The line doesn't exists. It's most profitable for the company to repeatedly:
1. Have an ad-supported tier, and a no-ads tier
2. Wait for most people to move to the no-ads tier
3. Introduce ads into the no-ads tier
4. Wait for people to get sick of ads
5. Introduce a new, higher cost no ads tier
There is no threshold where it's more profitable for the company to never introduce ads at that price point.
This information is available in the annual reports of all these companies. It's the advertising revenue per user per year. For Meta it's like $100 a year for U.S. users.
It's not easy to calculate how much you are worth because it depends on so many factors. And it wouldn't be nice to charge you 10x more than what they charge someone else.
The answer is that you're such a small minority that they'd rather not have you as a customer than maintain another pricing tier and logic fork.
The US executive branch should look into Disney for their part in bringing back piracy.
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
back to the pirate bay
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.
The BBC tax is the kind of thing you get if government and corporate media get really friendly.
No, it IS a full-blown punishment model. Remember, everyone else is bundling this garbage with their service, too, so the price raises Disney does is an excuse that forces everyone downstream that bundles to raise prices too.
I'm not even sure which Disney+ susbription I apparently am a part of at this point - my cable company provides it, my wireless provider provides it, hell, even shopping platforms are now shoving this crap into it as a 'perk'. I didn't want it in the first place but I'm forced to have it like a bundled set of cable channels I didn't want to subscribe to.
... dear God, it's just cable TV package cramming all over again just across every single service industry now.