Disney+ quietly puts ads in its 'ad-free' tier

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

They increased yearly subscription just two months ago, from €139 to €159. Those €20 alone should pay for the ads. And Disney+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all, while providing very limited content. This is completely out of touch.

Disney have/had this amazing strategy diagram https://kottke.org/15/06/walt-disneys-corporate-strategy-cha...

The thing people fail to appreciate about media empires is there is no ad/not-ad distinction: it is all an ad, either for other products or for more of the same media.

Also all of the subscription services now have such draconian IP checks, that the false positives for password sharing have become super annoying. Every time I have to prove that I am me.

Literally netflix, disney+, nytimes have become so annoying to use that I had to cancel.

Didn't they originally say there would be no ads on Disney+ ?

Now they're one of the worst. Hard to watch anything on there.

When the alternatives are free and a better product (no ads and easier to use) it seems odd to expect people to pay for something less convenient.