Sure, Disney Plus will let you keep your current price—if you start watching ads
Starting in December, ad-free Disney Plus will jump up to $10.99 a month—but you can stay at $7.99 if you go to an ad-supported plan.
Aux News Unknown
Disney, in its infinite benevolence, is offering customers a chance to put a more specific price on the precious time remaining in their lives in the coming months, announcing that it’s raising the cost for it subscription streaming service Disney+ this December—while also introducing an ad-supported tier operating at the current price of $7.99 a month.
Dubbed Disney+ Basic—as in, “we’re basically going to get more revenue out of you here one way or the other”—the ad-supported plan would reportedly launch with a requirement of making users consume four minutes of ad time per hour of content watched. (Initially in half-minute or minute-long slots, although it sounds like they have some ambitious plans for expanding their offerings out.) Meanwhile, if you’d like to stay out of ad-land, you’ll need to up your monthly price to $10.99 a month, which will knock you up into Disney+ Premium.
(To be clear: You already have Disney+ Premium, which is just what they’re calling the ad-free version of the service; you’re just going to be asked to pay more money for it.)
Both of these “new” plans will launch simultaneously, on December 8 of this year. (Also: Hulu’s getting its own hikes in October, up by a dollar—to $8.99—for its own ad-supported tier, and jumping from $12.99 to $14.99 for the ad-free version.)
For comparison’s sake, the new Premium version of Disney+ will now shoot up to being the fifth-most expensive streaming plan on the market, behind, obviously the new Hulu, which will be tied with HBO Max, plus Netflix’s Standard ($15.49) and Premium ($19.99) plans.
News of the price increases comes as The Money People focus increasing scrutiny on the actual profitability of the streaming boom, in the wake of Netflix posting subscriber losses earlier this year; most of these services launched with the understanding that they’d be money losers for at least their first few years in operation, but that period of leniency might definitely be on the wane.
19 Comments
What? The price of goods and services goes up over time? When did this start happening?
Maybe a better question is when 38% increases in the price of goods and services started happening, and being normalized by apologists.
It’s going up 38% overnight! If that keeps happening it will be $76/month by the end of a week!
Not even remotely what I implied or what’s relevant about the question.
sometimes i think the years of snarkiness have truly broken most brains around here. like, you’re ‘right’ but you still come off like a dumbass here.
Lousy Democrats!(I say that about everything)
I’d pay almost anything for something to distract my child for FIVE FUCKING MINUTES so I can actually get stuff done. So whatever to this, basically.
We used to blow 10 bucks a weekend at blockbuster. These prices seem fair.Of course a good vpn just costs about $3 a month…
yarrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Well Verizon better stick with the ad-free version. But their “Disney bundle included w/your unlimited plan” has Hulu with ads, so I’m not encouraged
Yup, I’m also wondering what’s going to happen with that Verizon bundle!
With all these streaming services launching ad-supported tiers around the same time, won’t the advertising market just bottom out again like it did in the dot com crash?
I hate watching ads a little bit at a time, can I just watch Free Guy once a month, and call it even?
Which ad-blockers will block the ads, though? That’s the real question. Hulu had a way of defeating ad blockers for a while so I didn’t watch Hulu, but some better ones came out.
Oh the gig is up all right. They lost over a billion dollars last year. That endless pipeline of Star Wars shows isn’t going to keep gushing forever.
It just feels like it is.
We currently get our Disney+ (and ad-supported Hulu) free through Verizon… I wonder how that will shake out.
It’s so much crazier than that. December just happens to be the window when the Comic-Con “exclusive” three-year window ends. People were able to sign up for 3 years at around $169 when it first launched. So come December, unless they want ads, that shit’s more than doubling. Of course it’s been three years, who knows how many cards have expired and how much churn they’re going to see.