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.
> 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?
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.
I don’t mind the in video sponsors. Some are good (ok map men ones are good), but crucially it’s not really something YouTube could directly block. They could put terms and conditions in place, but you’re driving product placement and it becomes a slippery slope.
Howver recently I’ve noticed adverts for “membership” for channels, and that is getting me close to picking my youtube habit.
Same with Spotify and advertising concerts, but that seems to have gone away for me after I complained.
Sadly even the bbc does adverts on iPlayer. You used to be able to instantly skip them, but then in a big (internal) fanfare some idiot decided they could make them not skippable and increase some metrics and then get a promotion.
YouTube actually does block sponsor spots in videos if you have Premium. They call it "Skip Ahead" and don't really talk about sponsor spots, but practically speaking it's 9/10 just the "skip sponsor segment" button.
I remember about 10-15 years ago YouTube actually did try to ban sponsor spots in videos, but the backlash from creators was strong enough that they walked that back to "ok well we'll allow sponsor spots but you can't just insert the sponsor's own ad, it's gotta be your ad read and B-roll".
Most of the UI features that YT added over the last few years can be thought of as a way to skip sponsor ads. e.g., thumbnail previews on the seek bar, the little histogram on the seek bar, auto-chapter detection, and playing at 2x when you click and hold on the video.
They make it slightly easier to find the end of a sponsor segment, while still requiring me to manually interact with the video. As an ad blocker I score that either F+ or D-.
that's not blocking though. It's allowing you to skip over the areas people commonly skip in videos where they take the data from everyone. I get them at sponsor slots of course, but also intros often. Because it's not removing it entirely, I would not consider that blocking.
The parent’s characterization is fine. 9/10 times (more in my own experience) it is the functional equivalent of a sponsor blocker. That it technically isn’t that specifically is immaterial, because if it works, that’s because people are skipping the sponsor segments in large enough quantities for it to easily become that.
That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.
Yes it tends to work one at a time, but some videos have two sponsor segments and it doesn’t work the second time. I assumed it skipped to where people often skip to.
I'm pretty sure that skip ahead is deliberately broken to satisfy advertisers.
Sponsorblock has zero issue jumping to the precise moment after the sponsor vs jump ahead always leaves just enough time to still hear the name of the sponsor.
100%. YouTube makes the skip button appear a few seconds after the start of the sponsored segment, and ends the skip a few seconds before the end of the sponsored segment.
That's their choice, and it's deliberate – it gives enough of a window for advertisers to get their message across, while still selling Premium users the notion that they've 'avoided' the ad.
It’s such a great feature, and I see why YouTube gates it to Premium.
Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.
It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.
In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.
When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.
That is quite deliberately YouTube’s fault. It only occurs with an ad blocker (VPN is irrelevant here, though it might be rolled out only in some countries), and the “experiencing interruptions?” thingy links to an article basically telling you to disable your ad blocker.
What ads do you see for channel membership? I run a channel and put some of my videos behind a membership gate. I mention the premium videos in some of my free videos but otherwise don't see options in the YouTube UI to actively promote my membership in any other way. Is it putting graphics or something inside the video to tell you to click the membership button?
>* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.
>
>* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.
I actually agree this is a bit annoying, but also the alternative is Google banning Youtubers from finding their own advertising partners, which I'm sure people would hate.
I'm sure content creators would hate it because they would make less money. Billions of YouTube users around the world would be very happy.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
Do they not have a little sponsor skip thing? Where like if many people skip a segment, itll pop up like hey, wanna skip? I mean, thats about all they can do besides forcing youtubers to disclose exact segment lengths which would concretely hurt them whereas this provides a little sort of breathing room, or just straight up ban them, both of which would dramatically hurt the platform.
I understand they have an opt-out feature now. With positive interaction one can skip one sponsored segment (which works most of the time). The problem is that it's not automated. It required digging one's phone out of their pocket, or reaching for the remote. That's still really annoying. To point: it's still full of ads, even if they have the skip button now.
YouTube could tell content creators not to include sponsorships. The terms are long and onerous. Of course content creators would be upset and they would make less money. Ultimately my issue is that YouTube advertises an ad free experience with Premium and it still has a LOT of ads.
I'm in favour of people making money from their work. Maybe I'm old fashioned that way. IMDB, Duolingo and Wikipedia have encouraged the model of using unpaid labour.
YouTube isn't paying people properly, despite its vast revenues. At least with sponsorship the people themselves make some money.
I'm not saying this is the way to go, but damn do I miss the old internet where passionate people presented information for free, at worst showing an affiliate link for an information-related book.
People need to be able to make a living and when this is taken away, the living expenses don't disappear. Most people can't pay for their electricity or food with voluntary work.
The people who were doing this on the early internet were not trying to make a living off of it, they were just doing it because they enjoyed it and wanted to share what they built with the world. If you could cover your server costs then that was considered a win.
There are plenty of people giving away their labour for free, which makes it harder for people who need to be able to make some money in order to support themselves.
They aren't always making passion projects. They're told unpaid labour is good for their CV/resumé, or that they're helping society (sometimes the case, but sometimes not).
Massive corporations such as Alphabet do have the resources to pay YouTubers, especially given how much tax they avoid in most countries.
YouTube is part of Alphabet, one of the biggest corporations in the world. It can easily afford to pay people. It isn't co-operation, it's a corporation which takes the work of other people and makes lots of money off them, without paying them properly (or at all in many cases). Wikipedia's content is used by LLMs and other such outlets who also profit off unpaid labour.
It is a basic right of people to be able to afford to live. It's easy to work for free when you have family money but you cannot support yourself when you don't.
> I'm in favour of people making money from their work.
That's completely fair. YouTube offers content creators many ways to do this. For example, they can put content behind a paywall. They can ask for donations. They can ask for memberships. Members get all kinds of fun perks. The part I have an issue with is YouTube advertising an ad free experience with Premium and then allowing content creators to fill their videos with ads.
> YouTube isn't paying people properly
I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly, and not allowing content creators to shit all over viewers. That's pitting the little guys against each other while Google laughs all the way to the bank.
You have to put in a disproportionate amount of work to get anything back. Almost no one makes money off a single video, but instead you make a string of videos and get a following. (The cases of a single video making money are few and far between.)
You don't get hourly pay for it, it's vaguely commission based and you do all your own promotion. They can demonetise you at a whim and refuse to pay you (I've seen this happen to craft channels and other content that wasn't remotely controversial.)
>I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly
The solution is proper competition to google. Because Youtube is pretty much the one true monopoly out there. But as we all know, video hosting alone is very,very, very expensive. It really is something you need to be a billion dollar company to do, and Youtube wasn't profitable until like... 2 years ago?
So I tolerate the user ad reads as the best compromise because nothing else would work. I don't think Youtube is a model where Google is being greedy so much as practical. At least not in how it monetizes creators (there's plenty of hostile means they do to creators as is, but the monetary structure seems fine).
There are alternative streaming platforms, but many of them have become associated with certain political viewpoints.
There is also a very limited range of content on Odyssee, Bitchute and all the rest. If you want to find music tutorials for example, you're unlikely to.
> To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
I think it's clear. I don't want YouTube going in and editing movies and creator videos removing any form of advertising. Maybe you want them deleting that content. But the average person realizes what Premium means by no ads. Being obtuse or willfully ignorant isn't reasonable.
no it wouldn't, such things are straight up illegal in most places? You have to clearly disclose ads + have clear distinction between ad content and rest of content. A bunch of youtubers have gotten in trouble for this?
I worked on Prime during the rollout of Prime Video and shortly after (maybe a year or so) pre-roll for other Prime Video content was inserted. I brought it up in a meeting with our org (but the Amazon Video team wasn’t present) and one of our business guys shrugged it off as not interrupting content, blah, blah, blah. I said the agreement was ad-free content, not uninterrupted content. The conversation stopped and nothing was done.
I worked on backend subscription management and the implementation of benefits. The team that business guy worked on was the group eventually at the center of the predatory subscription issue (I can’t say whether they were still around when that happened or not).
Pro tip. Ublock origin gets you that mostly ad-free experience you were hoping for. Donate the money you save from the YouTube premium sub to ublock origin instead.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the only way YouTube is even remotely watchable these days. Even still, it's not really worth it. I frequently find it better to spend my time doing anything else.
Oh absolutely - we banned “casual” YouTube use at home 5 years ago and we don’t regret it one bit. Still use it when looking up a concrete video on a specific topic or when a web page directs me to a tutorial or something there, but don’t use it for regular “entertainment” (I’m bored, let’s hit YouTube).
Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.
Sure! On Android TV, SmartTubeNext is fantastic. Installation instructions are in the GitHub repo. For Apple TV the best option I have found is MuTube. It's basically a YouTube repack without ads and with SponsorBlock. The catch is that it requires sideloading or an Apple developer account. Sideloadly etc can automatically refresh certificates while on wifi, but I ended up purchasing a dev account because it works for all the Apple devices in my home. Which leads me to the iPhone. There are many YouTube sideloads. I use uYouEnhanced. As above, you can use Sideloadly or sign the app yourself. An LLM or coding harness can walk you through the process (or do it for you). With an Apple dev account, signed apps last for a year, so I don't need to worry about refreshing the certs.
SmartTubeNext automatically updates itself, but the Apple TV and iPhone apps don't. Surprisingly, it has not been an issue. They keep working fine without updates for the year. I just update once a year when I refresh the certs.
"Ad free" meaning we do not insert ads seems like a reasonable standard to me. The alternative of policing creator content is kind of untenable since it destroys the economics for the creators and there's so much grey area.
It helps but I understand that it's not automatic. Is that correct? If so it significantly undermines the functionality. SponesorBlock automatically removes ads. Meaning I don't have to scramble to open my phone or find the remote every time I don't want to hear/see an ad. That opt-out UX likely means most people ultimately watch the sponsored content.
It could be that this is a phased approach so as not to anger their creators too much.
For me personally it is as easy as pressing one button on the remote. But I don't put on videos in the background very often.
Worth noting is that there are thousands of high quality YouTube channels without any sponsored content. So those are effectively completely ad free with Premium.
I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.
Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks? That's a bit onerous. My commercial agreement is with YouTube, not with the video creator.
If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
YT Premium does provide the "skip ahead" functionality that almost always jumps over sponsor blocks.
I will say I've been a YT Premium subscriber for years and I've never seen any ads for other Google services in my feed, and I don't get advert emails either.
> I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.
It is completely within Google's control. They have a hundred pages of terms of services, dictating everything the content creators may and may not do and say, down to individual words, symbols, and opinions. If Google wanted to, they could tell content creators to stop adding sponsorships. I understand you'd make less money.
> If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
I stopped paying YouTube and I use SponsorBlock now. You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
The problem is ultimately that Google advertises an ad free experience, which it's not. I'd be willing to pay for an ad free experience.
> You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
Ahhh but you're entitled to someone else's hard work in producing the content you watch, and god forbid they'd be entitled to compensation for that work.. Got it..
> Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks?
No, just mark the sponsored segments, so YouTube can skip over (like SponsorBlock does). And they already pay more per view from Premium users vs ad-supported ones, so it just makes sense to skip ads in the video as well.
That being said, I think paying creators directly is more sustainable in the long term.
I'd pay $20 / month for a Youtube subscription with no ads or sponsored content. Unfortunately even with sideloading on iOS there's no alternative live youtube vanced.
That's like complaining you purchased netflix subscriptiomn without ads and saw a product placement ad in a movie. I guess you want netflix to not show the movie, start cutting up the movie or ask that the movie be remade without any products.
YouTube sponsor segments are not subtle “place a Coke can facing the camera” integrations. They are dedicated ad segments with scripted (typically by the advertiser) promotions, often entirely unrelated to the video or channel.
To the end user they are indistinguishable from other video ads on the platform except the ad read is often (not always) done by the creator.
I don’t have hard data on the ratio but it’s not uncommon for a 10 minute video to have 1-2 minutes of full-interrupt ad segments embedded in the video.
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 ad 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.
This is a bigger problem than it may appear. The business lifecycle is well understood, whereby a company innovates, expands, and then when it has a sufficiently large customer base, it monetises. I.e. it enshitifies its products - making them more expensive over time relative to the value. This process is death by a thousand cuts. A PM might see that having the modal you hate show every time you load the site increases conversion by 3%. That's $1M ARR you just made the company! Wow! You get a bonus and a promotion! The problem is you erode customer sentiment by some undefined unit. Many people think NPS measures this, but it doesn't. That measures how many people love and hate the product. It omits the vast majority of people in the middle. They just add it to the increasing list of annoyances until one day there are so many annoyances that they leave. At that time it's very difficult for the company to understand why the user churned. It wasn't any one thing. It was a concerted effort over years to squeeze every cent out of the user at minimum cost.
> At that time it's very difficult for the company to understand why the user churned. It wasn't any one thing.
It's very easy to know for people inside the company who actually care about the product and for their clients. It is really hard for directors and VP that anything they understand are numbers.
If I say "hey this modal/pop up is making customers angry" they are going to ask how much they care (is there even an unit for that?) and how much revenue is lost. The only way for them to handle a project is creating a goal for next Q and assigning people, when in most cases what you need is actually the opposite.
The problem is not that no one knows how to fix it, the problem is that managers organize around big problems and become useless at improving the small things or details. They become blind. It happened to me 100 times. They do not want things to be fixed unless there's a clear revenue increase, which is stupid.
I get super bent out of shape when Apple TV+ advertises shows before the one I am trying to watch; even sometimes advertising the show that I am trying to watch itself and spoiling things.
I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.
I've talked to Apple support about this. Their website says...
Apple Originals are always commercial-free.
But you are forced to watch ads for other shows before viewing an Apple original. The support person said that because the ads are before the show you are trying to watch, that the show itself is indeed commercial-free. Language lawyering at its finest.
Yeah, I actually canceled Netflix when they started making it impossible to look at the available shows without seeing previews of each of them. I am trying to leisurely decide what I want to watch, not have 15 different actors scream catchphrases at me.
My journey went from downloading movies and TV shows to paying for Netflix, Apple, and Prime. Then back to torrents to avoid all the trailers and ads and curated feed. It's so peaceful now.
Good for you. It's impressive how many get jerked around but don't do the obvious thing and cancel the damn service. More people should feel outraged and insulted by these shenanigans.
Well, you'd be surprised how annoying it is to be a curmudgeon these days.
You can't even find wired (aux) headphones... So tempering expectations when you finally decide to "go back" to simple things is required.
I like to buy my media rather than pirate (I am a man of means after all) but I can't even buy modern media.. Silo, Ted Lasso, Severance and Slow Horses do not have purchasable releases at all. At least some Prime TV shows have blu-ray releases I suppose.
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 and stop using their service, easy as that.
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.
> My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up
But now these are targeted ads based on browsing data for ad profiles linked to your IP and devices. IMO just a few of these are far worse than the general run of commercials we used to have on TV. Corporations obviously think so too otherwise we would still have that.
I remember those days, and when Cartoon Network was the same. I didn't mind it then because, like you, I found the promos were a great way to know what was on the channel at different times. Especially in the age before on-screen guides.
But there are a few crucial differences between then and now: The ad spots were there to keep the timetables accurate, which is no longer necessary. They also served as a way to let you know what else was on the channel, which again is no longer necessary because that app opens to a menu of all available programming. And, now this is the important part, back then I wasn't specifically paying for ad-free access.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, my Jellyfin server is about to get much more use.
I agree. I noticed recently an ad directly inside of 1Password. I’ve paid for a 1Password subscription since 2013, and have had a family plan for many years. I know the company changed hands several years back after AgileBits sold to VC, but this type of disrespect caused me to cancel my membership. There are plenty of alternatives that haven’t turned their focus to the “Enterprise” and aren’t trying to extract as much money as possible from their paying customers.
What would you say is comparable experience wise to 1Password? I’ve found particularly the 1Password Family plan there’s not really a good alternative of rolling with KeepassX, Bitwarden, etc.
The answer could be nothing and I still respect the choice to speak with your wallet.
Bitwarden, while not quite as polished, works well. If you have your own server at home you can even self-host, which I do. It's an open source server side app called Vaultwarden [https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden] which connects to the Bitwarden app.
I think the iCloud password manager also works pretty well, provided you're using Apple products.
The BBC in the UK makes a great play of having "no ads" but 6Music (their indie music station) has constant cross-promotions interrupting the music, sometimes for jarring TV murder shows. Cross-promotion is just as annoying as ads for insurance, I hate it!
Yeah, those kinds of ads are always aggravating to me because you’re not even making money by showing them to me. They feel like a display of power more than anything else.
One of the most egregious examples of this that's happened to me was with the DVD set of the second or third season of Mad Men. One of the unskippable pre-menu ads was for the next season.
And I didn't know what to say. Either I like the series and I'm going to buy the next season or I don't and I won't.
Yes I see those, and adverts for other services (watch this program etc) as adverts.
I don’t see adverts embedded in content as adverts. Be sure I’m watching the World Cup on bbc and see an advert on the players shirt doesn’t mean I want my money back, I’d rather we had no adverts, but it’s not unreasonable.
You are implying something false. That he’s suggesting thats not an ad. Hes not suggesting that at all.
What he’s suggesting is that that’s very different from Disney gating or interspersing movies with ads. Which it is. You may disagree with that but you’re strawmanning him.
I may be an outlier but I don't really mind being shown a relatively short ad before watching something. I'm almost never really paying attention yet anyways. Like yes, I'd prefer it not to exist but it doesn't cause me to get into a fit of rage.
But ads in the middle of something I'm watching? Fuck right off with that.
People turned a blind eye to Apple advertising it's own services in it's products for years. I saw people defend here, on HN. So, while yes, it's advertising, Disney is far from the first to do this.
I'm not saying it's right, only that people who claim to be opposed to ads are accepting of the type of ads we are discussing.
> if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?
I'm assuming they aren't showing you ads for the plan you are on.
An add, but no more than catching a glimps of a restaurant long after one has ordered. When standing in a shop it is normal to see prices for other products on offer.
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:
>they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.
That's just how lawyers work. They'll try to invoke any defense that's vaguely applicable, just like any plaintiff lawyer will try to invoke any cause of action that's vaguely applicable, like the plaintiffs in this exact case.
The TOS argument was so awful it deserves some kind of bonus loss, but let's put that aside for now.
Let's say I paint a fence, and my neighbor complains I ruined a particular segment that shouldn't have been painted. Why can't I argue that this segment was on my property and that my neighbor gave permission to use that paint on all segments on their property?
Let's say there's a 15% chance the survey was wrong about the fence location, and a 15% chance the court disagrees with how I'm interpreting the agreement. If I can use both arguments I have a 2% chance of losing, which seems fair to me. Both arguments are reasonable, so why should I have to risk it on only one?
That’s not at all how lawyers or businesses work. The job of the lawyer is to represent the client. Lawyers didn’t ultimately decide to use the ToS in this way, Disney did. Disney estimated the reputational risk and calling attention to their morally (and legally) questionable ToS was worth the risk.
Stop infantilizing these people as if they have no other way to behave. It isn’t a law of nature that companies have to behave immorally. Hopefully you apply that understanding to your own job, too.
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.
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.
It sucks that Disney+ cancelled Bobba Fett and other great Star Wars series. One month at a time makes sense especially with the lack of new content that I want.
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?
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.
No, there's nothing really to do. They aren't producing the feed, they're essentially hosting a stream from another broadcaster.
For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.
I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.
But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
Let’s reverse the situation, they were able to add ads to sport events, so they can definitely remove ads and show the main event cameras if they wanted to. But they’re picking up showing ads indirectly through some other service.
I noted that the streaming service, like Paramount+, would be able to overlay their own ads over the broadcasted commercials, but they won't have control over the cameras. That's on the broadcast station, they're the ones controlling the remote production.
Paramount+ can only rebroadcast what my local CBS affiliate is broadcasting.
I think only Netflix and Prime have deals to actually produce sports broadcasts.
> But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
I.e. instead of dead air, they could show some live feed in the spot that other broadcasters use for commercials.
What's happening in that time is just random bullshit. They'll run bits on the jumbotron, hold raffles, go play games with people in the stands, etc. All sponsored by "<SO AND SO>, the official <THING> of your <LOCAL SPORTS TEAM>". Or, in other words, ads.
You could show the players and coaches on the sidelines, but that's also rather boring. It'll be a couple of guys shooting the shit on a bench, or a couple of guys hunched over a table, or some guys warming up.
The best thing they can do is like information from other games maybe.
Honestly, I was going by my most recent experience, which was F1 in Singapore last year. (I’ve been in Singapore at the time, but haven’t managed to get to a good spot, so I was watching it online a couple blocks away.) That thing had ads every minute, but the race obviously doesn’t stop during the breaks.
> What's happening in that time is just random bullshit.
Are most sports events like this? It sucks then, but the playing games with people in the stands thing sounds better than just plain ads. Mix that with sidelines shots, some alternative commentary maybe (with some instant replays?), and sure, information from other games, and you get a nice, coherent broadcast with some ads from the stadium but none that are as out of place as the usual commercial breaks.
Does uBlock work on commercials aired as part of a stream/broadcast? I don't mean where they interrupt the stream and insert an ad, I mean that it's part of the video produced.
I genuinely don't know and am asking out of curiosity.
I'm unsure. I believe I've seen Telemundo at certain events, but they could have deals to rebroadcast and they'd have the same options as Paramount+. They can run ads over the broadcast ads and swap the audio feed with their own. The broadcast feed should have at the very least; a video feed, a crowd/stadium audio feed, and the commentary audio feed. So they could just not rebroadcast the commentary audio and replace it with their own.
A lot of the ads on the field and perimeter are themselves inpainted. And becoming more and more offensive over time, with animation and flashing and such as technical capabilities improve and viewers become accustomed and don’t revolt.
I'm sure somewhere there's an ad exec ready to rollout personalized in-game ads that say "hey Chris Morgan, try Henson's ball wash!" From data provided by your smart TV and your secret profile from data brokers.
Our research shows that people with peanut allergies buy a lot of candy bars. We want to tap into that market, so we make a product call NoPeanutBars. But making them in a dedicated peanut-free facility costs a lot of money and extra work, and we really can't figure out how to do it. So we just put a disclaimer on the back that says NoPeanutBars may actually contain peanuts. What's the big deal? We don't put the peanuts in there on purpose!
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.
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.
look we know 99% of people hate being tracked but we need the data to see if 0.1% or 0.5% people are clicking the links, you've got to be a team player here
When I watch motorcycle races live on Peacock with my no-ab subscription they just go quiet for the commercial breaks that other providers/plans run. No announcers or on screen displays, but it does keep a live feed or the race. So the whole "we don’t have an alternative" part I do take exception with.
fwiw... I believe Peacock is also allowed to run ads during live events, but at least during my motorcycle races they do not. a couple seasons ago they would go to a peacock banner and not show anything during the commercial breaks, but at some point they switched to just showing the raw video.
I'll be clear that no I didn't - I read the announcement when Disney+ emailed it to me with no further context, plus adding this disclaimer was the reason for the email. So I disagree that this is our fault.
They mailed me too, and I did read it in full. There's a link right there in the e-mail. I read it, and understood it's not at all what everyone here is claiming.
The email contains the full subscriber agreement (which is also the link in the email).
The full text for that section:
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.
Perhaps you could share, from the email, what you read that everyone else is missing.
I don't mind self-ads especially if its like "Hey we're releasing this new movie in 2 weeks, are you aware?" just so long as I can skip them after the first time, and they are pre-cached when I open the app so you can download my movie / show in the background while this one plays. Guess I'm being wishful about good engineering. ;)
Even that is a bit too much to my taste. For self-promotion pre-roll kind of ads, if I can skip it the first time I see it, and I don’t see it ever again, and I don’t see more than one ad like this per day per series, then I’m reluctantly okay with that.
But ideally, just stick to some non-video recommendation UI during the credits, and let me discover things on your platform by myself otherwise, and don’t get in my way when I’m trying to enjoy the show.
Those are definitely ads and definitely not what I want out of a streaming service I am paying for. This is why I don't use Amazon Prime Video much, even Apple TVs subtle ads for other programs are distasteful and I get Apple TV for free, it still pisses me off.
> 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 don't like when I press play and an advertisement starts for some other freshly released content on the same platform.
I'd argue that since TiVo, if you're showing ads because "we don't have an alternative", you actually want to show ads or at least won't make any effort to implement a 20 year old technology for the sake of convenience.
When you select play on the media, does that media play, or some other bullshit get inserted first?
Call it what you want, if it's serving me content I didn't ask for, I'm not happy about it, especially if I'm paying extra for them to not do that explicit thing.
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.
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?
I'm not familiar with MLB, only with NBA. But even their "ad-free" really isn't - there are still ad banners inside the arenas, on the court itself, and on the jerseys, the announcers often read ads ("this segment was brought to you by ..."), and if there is arena feed during the regular breaks, the in-arena events like a half-court shot are often sponsored as well. Plus there's standard service ads that announce next games.
Unless MLB blurs/bleeps all of these, it's not really ad-free.
1. I hate the MLB one the most. I'm international so maybe it works differently but each season they come up with these horrible clips that they play on repeat. Sometimes it's a little short history snippet or this season some stuff about food. Problem is they have minimal content and so many breaks that by day two of the season they're tortuous. I'd rather have ads.
2. It probably depends on what sports we're talking about. Again, I'm thinking internationally where they've started showing La Liga this season.
> 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.
NASCAR has a separate feed for international broadcasts without their ads. During the ad break they'll just show an overhead camera or maybe an in car camera.
Yeah I'm familiar with that. I guess it all depends on the sport and country. Ads during the sport is quite unusual in the UK for example so we get that NASCAR feed where the camera continues with no commentary during US ad breaks. We also have a cool setup for Indycar where a local UK commentator jumps in to talk over the feed while the US goes to a break. For MLB (on their own league pass product) we get a blank screen or non-ad montage thing in between innings (although as I mentioned in another comment that's its own kind of hell).
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.)
Honestly Disney+ app is the gold standard. No auto play like Netflix. Classy and thoughtful design. Amazon is the worst. Those Buy Now buttons on commercials good God what a load of crap.
Well they do have an alternative. ESPN and I'm sure plenty of other live events will often play ads. But if you have a pihole or some issue that causes the ad not to play, the screen will just display something like, "Ad cannot be loaded. Event will resume in 1 minute and xx seconds."
Is that a GREAT alternative to seeing an ad? Nope. But in many peoples opions it sbetter than being force fed the same ads over and over when you paid for an ad free service.
And if you read the wiki in full you will see it also is talking about preroll content. I dont HATE the HBO pre roll ads for their own shows that play before I start an episode but it is still an ad. Its for content I might actually enjoy instead of for paper towels or insurance but it is still an ad. This is something that is entirely optional and that disney/hulu has decided doesnt count as an ad.
All that matters is the actual agreement. The agreement says there's an exception where "streaming rights or other limitations require certain Content to play with ads," and that "no ads" and "ad-free" tiers can contain "limited promotional content," with some examples of what "limited promotional content" might include, but no actual restrictions on it.
That's extremely broad. They won't show you ads, unless "other limitations require" them to? Would "our internal agreement between our streaming division and our content division requires ads" qualify? What would qualify as "promotional content" and in what sense is it "limited"?
This reads to me as "we can show ads anywhere we feel like it even if you paid us not to have ads." The only actual limitation will be their desire not to piss off paying subscribers.
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.
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.
It's worse than that. Advertising is a vector for dumping who-knows-what into our minds. Would you let random corporate sponsors put whatever they wanted into your food after you'd already put in the work to choose what you're eating?
To me, my time has value, and my thoughts have more. A party whose goal is to interfere with both, and who actively schemes to interfere with the integrity of both is not merely greedy, they are a hostile actor.
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.
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.
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.
This is part of why last year I mostly switched to just borrowing DVDs from my public library. Avoiding ads by not paying seems to do the trick rather nicely. The quality and variety is better than what I can find on any one streaming service, too.
Every year it gets more and more important to learn how to not be sucked in by a small amount of convenience. "Capitalism" has figured out how to abuse your desire for maximum convenience. You need to figure out what your price is for it, and stick to it like glue.
The funny thing is the sooner you get off of some particular convenience treadmill the easier it is to stay off.
The funny thing is, it may be less convenient but it's also more enjoyable.
Endlessly scrolling some algorithmic feed hunting for something to watch can be done without getting off the couch, but it isn't actually fun. Walking to the library with my family to return a stack of books and movies and check out some new stuff is one of the highlights of our weekend.
For anyone who's wondering where to start, I'd like to suggest that your library probably has a copy of WALL-E.
You're not wrong. But the only solutions appear to be varying levels of being a free-rider, which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable. The long-term solution is probably to only consume locally-made goods and content, public-domain content, or vintage goods.
You can cancel a subscription. That's how subscriptions work. That means that any future changes is not a concern for current offerings.
And I can't understand why hackers never acknowledge this.
I can put gas in the tank of my car. In the future, they might lower the quality of the gas - or even make it more expensive! That doesn't change anything about the gas that I will currently put in my car.
> you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff
Advertisers already know that a hundred percent of the population have $20 in disposable monthly income, because they can pay with credit. So they don't learn anything new.
So you don't die: The population in the regions where these subscriptions are offered.
Every region where a streaming subscription costs $20 per month, 100% of the population has $20 in disposable income per month whether they actually have the money or not, because credit is offered for consumption.
Every region where a streaming subscription costs $5 per month, 100% of the population has $5 in disposable income per month for the same reason.
The original argument I responded to, is a typical hacker trope and of logical fallacy that gets repeated infinitely. It goes like this: "Just because somebody spent $10 or $20 on something which I would never want to buy, means they must be extremely rich and extremely wasteful with their money. So advertiser are drooling and crawling over each other to get their hands on this cash."
If that's the case, then advertisers clearly must also target tattooed people as the most valuable customer group possible, since every tattoo is proof that somebody once had 50 dollars.
The gas analogy is a good one, because those fuckheads also shove advertising in your face when you're already giving them money for a product.
The issue isn't your ability to cancel individual services. The issue is the increasing difficulty of living life as part of society without constantly having advertising shoved down our throats.
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.
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.
Lately I've been helping my mom downsize. She's got boxes and boxes of household goods that she held on to because it belonged to her mother or grandmother or great aunt or whoever. Basically just, when the time came to clean out the old house, dump the kitchen cabinets into a box, put the box in the basement, and leave it there for 40 years.
And the thing that's struck me is how much of this stuff is cheaply made and barely holds together. Sure, there's the occasional well-built item that resembles the stuff I'm used to seeing in antique stores. But mostly I'm just getting a lesson in how much survivorship bias informs my perception of 20th century consumer products.
If anything the real trend is the shift to plastic, which can be more durable but is also more prone to complete instead of partial failure and generally isn't repairable. e.g. a tin measuring cup might dent easily, but can also be bent back into shape. A plastic one probably won't suffer anything more than a scratch when you drop it, but when it finally does crack that's the end of it.
Speaking of plastic, so many people nostalgically remember Tupperware as a quality product that's much nicer than what you can get nowadays. But the truth is it was a multi-level marketing scam and their products were often contaminated with heavy metals. It used to be a lot easier to prop up a brand image in the pre-Internet days, when consumers largely couldn't talk to each other en masse like we do nowadays.
Say what you want about tupperware, but I just bought a set of ancient tupperware from a thrift store and even the second hand quality of it beats anything I have bought in the last 20 years hands down.
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.
There was much more than just the high profile egregious cases though.
Most food adulteration is a quality issue more than a safety problem.
Buy old peas but put a little green coloring in is almost the exact same thinking as let’s replace the metal gears with plastic ones to save a dollar per item. The vast majority of companies doing that didn’t kill or seriously injure anyone.
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.
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.
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".
The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.
30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.
It's not meant to be idealistic at all. There very much should be a whole lot more that goes into the decision to raise prices or introduce ads or whatever that might upset your customers.
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?
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?
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.
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.
There's always competition for the consumer dollar, unless you are the only business selling necessities for survival such as electricity, gas, food, and such.
Without copyright, almost none of the content would get produced, especially in this digital age of zero-cost copying, and “they” (the companies) wouldn’t exist.
I don't think that's true. Copyright isn't more than a few hundred years old. Humans have been making and performing creative works for thousands of years.
Did Shakespeare or Chaucer need copyright? What about da Vinci? And the cave painters of Lascaux?
Sure you may argue that copying had costs back then and doesn't today. Maybe that's the only difference but maybe it isn't. I think creativity and art are human compulsions. Not mere commercial endeavors.
All this to say: it would be a very different industry. But it wouldn't cease to exist.
We had way, way less, and less polished, entertainment a few hundred years ago. Without copyright, you would mostly only get productions like what now exists as fan/amateur projects. Virtually no creator would be able to make a living from it, other than from stage shows (theater/opera/music concerts).
Copyrights are such constrained monopolies, though. More or less on the same level as how Nike has a monopoly on Air Jordans, but not on shoes in general.
One of the most interesting things about media consumerism is the extent to which people fail to realize that watching something else is always an option.
That's beyond hyperbolic. Yes there has been consolidation in the mainstream media industry, but I still have better access to more distribution channels than I did in the early 2000s. Especially when it comes to indie stuff.
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.
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...."
This is, however, part of why we're trending towards mandatory ID verification to use the internet+ attempts to illegalize encryption and consumer VPNs.
VPNs only help you with Bittorrent piracy. The kind where you buy a set-top box is still most easily caught by a police officer seeing you using the box, or selling you the box, not by anything they can do on the internet.
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.
The fare-dodging example is valid for recent movies and music but it falters for older stuff where "older" means "older than the original copyright term", i.e. between 18 and 21 years. Beyond that it is more comparable to charging a wind-fee to sailing boats or a current-fee to river runners: taking money for a common good. Copyright has been extended and extended again just to keep people from drawing a cartoon mouse or singing a birthday song and that makes current copyright terms just as piratical as the self-styled internet pirates who have no qualms about releasing movies the day they are premiered.
Here's a fix: bring copyright terms back to something sensible, say 15 years. After that point copyrighted material is free to use for non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes you still need a licence for another 10-15 years. Beyond that it becomes public domain, no licence required.
They should start making good quality products and charging a price people are willing to pay then. Do you realise piracy is just about the only leverage consumers have here?
It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.
But there will still be demand for content, and people who are willing to pay for a non-enshittified experience. Piracy is essentially the consumer bargaining chip in an era of unprecedented centralization and monopoly power.
This is an argument for not pirating indie games or books from smaller authors. There's no way Disney sees people pirating and just stops making content. It is all they know how to do
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.
The Pitt does get a lot of people to subscribe to HBO Max just to watch the show. Producing at least one compelling TV show each quarter has been HBO's business model for several decades.
Companies are profit machines that chase where money is. They grow like weeds in fertile spots.
It's on consumers to chose where to water, and consumers consistently chose the cheapest most immediately convenient shit. The Yin to "Corporations are all about profit" is the Yang of "Consumers are all about minimizing spend"
I can tell you with confidence that if you leave the consumer market and go to the commercial market (and especially the defense market), where they worship quality and reliability instead of "absolute cheapest option", the amount of enshitification and deceit drops dramatically, and you end up with some really solid (and expensive!) products. Consumers want an oven that costs $600. Restaurants pay $6,000 for theirs.
That doesn't really make sense here. This whole issue is about the more expensive options. "Consumers are all about minimizing spend" right, and that's why they have a cheap option with ads. That's fine. I don't approve of advertising, especially in paid products, but they tell you exactly what they're selling. But they also have a more expensive option with "no ads." And guess what, that's a lie!
Why do I buy the cheapest oven possible? Because I have little defense against oven manufacturers doing the same thing Disney is doing with its higher-end subscriptions, and giving me expensive crap. I'm often happy to pay more for quality. But that's becoming more and more difficult as reputational signals get hacked. When I sort by price and buy the cheapest option, it's not because I prefer price to quality. It's because I have no way to judge or discover the quality of the more expensive options. For all I know, they're just as bad, or worse. So I choose the cheapest option because there's nothing else that distinguishes them.
It used to be that the goal of a company was to compete in a market and gain value through performance in that market over the long term.
In the 1990s, several CEOs, including Jack Welch, realized how exactly things work. Namely, most shares are held by retirement and pension plans who employ entire companies' worth of people to find a way to diversify and hedge, and the reporting period for their earnings is 90 days. You had major chunks of corporate capital held by people who couldn't really care less about anything other than the line going up, and any way to do so within three months was valid.
Once a company has achieved a certain market position, the long-term and non-financial aspects of holding shares (pride in the company, an interest in the market they competed in, etc.) are unimportant, and the customer's opinion stops mattering as much. You can assume that enough customers will stay around through sheer inertia no matter what you do, and that includes breaking up the company and selling it for scrap.
Since most shareholders aren't really attached to any one company's holdings, they plan for customers to leave when companies do anti-consumer things, and if a company is broken up, they just take the earnings per share on that break-up and plow it into something else that sounds like it'd be profitable.
You have to do business with people who are operating in a spot below that market position if you really want them to care about pleasing you as a customer.
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.
Always cancel immediately after you sign up. Treat all streamers as one-month-at-a-time purchases and you’ll realize how much you’ve been paying for that you weren’t using.
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.
long time Netflix user, my experience using Netflix with ads is the opposite. I find watching anything on Netflix unbearable due to frequent ads. I’m about to pull the plug
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.
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.
Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?
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.
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"
I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about.
It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.
This comes across to me as judgmental (and you don’t know the situation of my kids and their screen time), my view is to each their own, it’s an option you can turn on/off as per your own preference.
Sorry no I didn't mean to judge, it's like you said, everyone has a different requirement. One should have control which is something the billionaires don't want to give away.
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.
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).
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.
Taking the cash from a bank deprives others of the money. Duplicating a video doesn’t deprive another person of anything.
Piracy is simple: when you make your product more convenient than piracy, people use it. Steam is popular for a reason - no crap, enormous game selection.. it’s just better than pirating. Netflix used to be the same - great selection, no ads.. now look: terrible selection and price is too high.
Setting aside the fact that you didn't actually answer my question: the objective answer is not "no". That's just a frame and some assumptions you'd like everyone to hold in order to justify yourself.
I can’t speak for everyone else’s take on it, but I do feel like I addressed your question.
A significant portion of piracy is opportunistic as far as I’m aware, in that people say “well, since it’s free I’ll grab it”. The opportunity cost is effectively zero.
What I’m getting at is that if you have 100 people who pirate the film, perhaps only 5 of those might have been willing to pay to see it, if only there was a convenient opportunity to do so. No money was lost through the other 95 - their decision was between ‘pirate’ and ‘don’t watch it’.
Of the remaining 5, yes, it’s lost revenue, but that’s because there likely wasn’t a convenient service with no ads at a price where people think they’re getting value. It’s all about convenience at the end of the day - if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.
The point of my question was to note that, if everyone acts like pirates do, then the people who make the thing make zero dollars, which would hurt them greatly - they will be deprived of something meaningful. So the idea that piracy does not do this at all is false.
Pirates violate the terms that the creators ask in exchange for their work, and get to enjoy content at no cost to them by free-riding off of people who pay, and then try to argue that this is Actually Fine because they weren't going to pay for it anyways.
"I wouldn't pay for it anyways" is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and it's a bad moral code anyways: the only difference between me doing an Actually Fine thing and an Actually Bad thing is my own personal judgment about whether or not I was going to pay for it.
>if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.
So you are conceding that the service will suffer if people pirate?
Regardless, that's completely separate from the question of whether or not mild inconveniences give you the right to enjoy non-essential-for-life fruits of the labors of others without compensating them for it.
The production crew is getting peanuts anyway. If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead.
Also maybe it's their job to come up with a business model that everyone doesn't hate. If they'd just syndicate to all streaming platforms, piracy wouldn't be a problem for them.
Right! If the price is too high, I can decide I don't want to pay it.
It's quite a leap from that to "I personally think that an animator's salary is too high, and I have the right to benefit from the fruit of their labor, therefore it is morally acceptable for me to enjoy this film without paying anyone" or whatever.
>Duplicating a video doesn’t deprive another person of anything
This was the claim. I said what I said to point out that if everyone acted on this belief for a feature film, there would be a thousand people who ultimately don't get compensated for their work.
You are right: not everyone is able or willing to pirate. Piracy is only able to exist because of these people who pay for art. That's definitely true, and definitely different than the claim that no one is being deprived of anything.
They are deprived of the payment they asked for in exchange for someone viewing their work.
Also, "the pirate was never going to pay" is a far more imaginary thing here; it's an unproven claim (especially since it's often paired with "pirates would pay if it was cheaper/more convenient to access).
Regardless, it strikes me as a particularly arrogant kind of entitlement for you to violate someone's terms to enjoy their thing while telling them you think it's worthless.
I'm personally happy to pay to watch without adverts. I'm not willing to pay for adverts. If they only sell it with adverts, then I'm never going to pay for it. Whether or not I watch it, they don't lose a dime.
I understand the idea of refusing service you don't like, but there's just no way that disliking a service gives you the right to rewrite terms.
I dunno man. If you're gonna benefit from the hard work of others without compensating them, so be it. It's the pretension that you're doing something other than that, for motives other than pure self-interest, which really bothers me.
You haven’t explicitly claimed one. If you have a motive besides wanting to see the thing without feeling like you stole something, I'd like to hear it.
Isn't that the whole point of the free market? Make the total cost/effort for something lower than the alternative, and people will pay for it. I paid for Netflix for ages when they had every show/movie that I wanted to watch, instead of stuff being fragmented across 20 services.
Sure, that's the point of the free market. But anywhere else in the free market, we don't say "I don't want to pay for this/deal with the inconvenience, so I'll just take it for free".
The only way people try to make this work logically is to talk about how a digital good has a nominal real cost - but that's a very different argument.
And they're taking a risk that the movie turns out bad. It does seem like newer movies have become mediocre because they don't want to take risks anymore.
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.
HBO, on their “ad-free” tier shows ads for their own content before almost everything. I reached out to support about this and they said they don’t count those as ads.
These companies are all scum. They shift definitions and make the service worse. I won’t be renewing my subscription to HBO over this (I’m upset I bought a whole year), and I won’t be opting for Disney+ in the future either, as it sounds like they are doing similar things (and more).
To me, “no ads” means “no ads”. I’m done with these technical definitions people come up with in board rooms to subvert customer expectations and erode product quality.
Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No.
Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.
Really, people don't pay for 'ad free' .. rather, they do, but what they really want is 'interruption free', which I think is why Disney+ promoting their own content as part a stream is essentially perceived as an 'ad'. I personally think it should be considerd an ad regardless of it being your own content or not. I don't care if it's someone else's , or your content, it's an advert for that content.
PSA: Soon german brand AVM will have dns blocking of advertising right in their routers (fritz box). Search the web for Fritz!OS 8.40 if you are interested.
Working in video ads has validated that I basically never pay for video or music services. 90% of dev time is spent optimizing the monetization path while the playback path needs to be good enough.
Anecdotally, appleTV never remembers which episode I was watching or the timestamp in the episode. I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV.
That said, IMO this is the only business model for streaming companies and content owners to see bucketloads of money, so it sticks. Also, free tier makes for easy entry.
But I would gladly pay $10/month for a seamless streaming experience (app and playback) where I just select a couple of titles at a time. Similar to the mail version of netflix, but without snail mail.
At this point, streaming a known catalog is a text-book system, albeit expensive in terms of distro and bandwidth.
In my experience, I'm usually revising TV shows and movies that I enjoy.
Say I want to rewatch the office or snatch. I just don't have the patience for the dongle to wake up and refresh all the banner ads, then the app to load, then get ads.
I should appreciate how far technology has come that a tiny computer is running off 10W to connect to the internet to watch and listen to anything I can imagine. But in that moment, I just want it to work as smoothly as turning on a dvd player.
The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.).
Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition.
A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.
At the movies I can grab popcorn while the ads play. And usually the ads are for other movies, often enough topical. Watching an action movie, get ads for more action movies.
If ads are playing on the TV, they inject themselves into your home. Especially kids now wanting to buy or watch that you didn’t get to vet.
i don't think i've ever seen a discussion about movie theaters online where people weren't complaining about preroll ads, going back a good 20 years when this started to happen :)
Use BBC from abroad and you see scam ads and the "which bar would you move to save the king" crap. They're not morally above this, only legally within the UK
I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free.
Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.
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).
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.
> 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?
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.
I don’t mind the in video sponsors. Some are good (ok map men ones are good), but crucially it’s not really something YouTube could directly block. They could put terms and conditions in place, but you’re driving product placement and it becomes a slippery slope.
Howver recently I’ve noticed adverts for “membership” for channels, and that is getting me close to picking my youtube habit. Same with Spotify and advertising concerts, but that seems to have gone away for me after I complained.
Sadly even the bbc does adverts on iPlayer. You used to be able to instantly skip them, but then in a big (internal) fanfare some idiot decided they could make them not skippable and increase some metrics and then get a promotion.
YouTube actually does block sponsor spots in videos if you have Premium. They call it "Skip Ahead" and don't really talk about sponsor spots, but practically speaking it's 9/10 just the "skip sponsor segment" button.
I remember about 10-15 years ago YouTube actually did try to ban sponsor spots in videos, but the backlash from creators was strong enough that they walked that back to "ok well we'll allow sponsor spots but you can't just insert the sponsor's own ad, it's gotta be your ad read and B-roll".
Most of the UI features that YT added over the last few years can be thought of as a way to skip sponsor ads. e.g., thumbnail previews on the seek bar, the little histogram on the seek bar, auto-chapter detection, and playing at 2x when you click and hold on the video.
They make it slightly easier to find the end of a sponsor segment, while still requiring me to manually interact with the video. As an ad blocker I score that either F+ or D-.
that's not blocking though. It's allowing you to skip over the areas people commonly skip in videos where they take the data from everyone. I get them at sponsor slots of course, but also intros often. Because it's not removing it entirely, I would not consider that blocking.
The parent’s characterization is fine. 9/10 times (more in my own experience) it is the functional equivalent of a sponsor blocker. That it technically isn’t that specifically is immaterial, because if it works, that’s because people are skipping the sponsor segments in large enough quantities for it to easily become that.
That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.
Yes it tends to work one at a time, but some videos have two sponsor segments and it doesn’t work the second time. I assumed it skipped to where people often skip to.
I'm pretty sure that skip ahead is deliberately broken to satisfy advertisers.
Sponsorblock has zero issue jumping to the precise moment after the sponsor vs jump ahead always leaves just enough time to still hear the name of the sponsor.
100%. YouTube makes the skip button appear a few seconds after the start of the sponsored segment, and ends the skip a few seconds before the end of the sponsored segment.
That's their choice, and it's deliberate – it gives enough of a window for advertisers to get their message across, while still selling Premium users the notion that they've 'avoided' the ad.
It’s such a great feature, and I see why YouTube gates it to Premium.
Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.
It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.
In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.
When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.
Try watching YouTube without logging in through a VPN with an ad blocker. You get 5s black screens and "Experiencing Interruptions?" popups.
If they don't want people watching videos without logging in, they should gate them behind a login screen rather than fucking with their users.
I was getting that when logged in, without VPN (but still ad blocking.)
That’s because you’re not a YouTube customer. You want to consume their product without paying and without viewing any ads.
They are very logically making that difficult for you. They are exercising their right to refuse service to you.
Aka a leech. Even torrent sites look down on that behavior.
I wasn't sure which of the parameters was causing it. Looks like ad blocking is the one, then.
Are you sure that wasn't the VPN's fault?
That is quite deliberately YouTube’s fault. It only occurs with an ad blocker (VPN is irrelevant here, though it might be rolled out only in some countries), and the “experiencing interruptions?” thingy links to an article basically telling you to disable your ad blocker.
What ads do you see for channel membership? I run a channel and put some of my videos behind a membership gate. I mention the premium videos in some of my free videos but otherwise don't see options in the YouTube UI to actively promote my membership in any other way. Is it putting graphics or something inside the video to tell you to click the membership button?
>* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner. > >* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.
I actually agree this is a bit annoying, but also the alternative is Google banning Youtubers from finding their own advertising partners, which I'm sure people would hate.
I'm sure content creators would hate it because they would make less money. Billions of YouTube users around the world would be very happy.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
Do you only watch videos from creators who are not trying to make money?
If they couldn't make money, 80% of the content worth watching would not be produced.
Premium works for me. Is it perfect, no. But there's that saying about perfect being the enemy of good.
Do they not have a little sponsor skip thing? Where like if many people skip a segment, itll pop up like hey, wanna skip? I mean, thats about all they can do besides forcing youtubers to disclose exact segment lengths which would concretely hurt them whereas this provides a little sort of breathing room, or just straight up ban them, both of which would dramatically hurt the platform.
I understand they have an opt-out feature now. With positive interaction one can skip one sponsored segment (which works most of the time). The problem is that it's not automated. It required digging one's phone out of their pocket, or reaching for the remote. That's still really annoying. To point: it's still full of ads, even if they have the skip button now.
YouTube could tell content creators not to include sponsorships. The terms are long and onerous. Of course content creators would be upset and they would make less money. Ultimately my issue is that YouTube advertises an ad free experience with Premium and it still has a LOT of ads.
YouTube Premium now has "skip ahead" which is basically this. Or you can install SponsorBlock and get a much better version for free.
I'm in favour of people making money from their work. Maybe I'm old fashioned that way. IMDB, Duolingo and Wikipedia have encouraged the model of using unpaid labour.
YouTube isn't paying people properly, despite its vast revenues. At least with sponsorship the people themselves make some money.
I'm not saying this is the way to go, but damn do I miss the old internet where passionate people presented information for free, at worst showing an affiliate link for an information-related book.
People need to be able to make a living and when this is taken away, the living expenses don't disappear. Most people can't pay for their electricity or food with voluntary work.
The people who were doing this on the early internet were not trying to make a living off of it, they were just doing it because they enjoyed it and wanted to share what they built with the world. If you could cover your server costs then that was considered a win.
There are plenty of people giving away their labour for free, which makes it harder for people who need to be able to make some money in order to support themselves.
People making passion projects for free don't owe anyone a business model.
They aren't always making passion projects. They're told unpaid labour is good for their CV/resumé, or that they're helping society (sometimes the case, but sometimes not).
Massive corporations such as Alphabet do have the resources to pay YouTubers, especially given how much tax they avoid in most countries.
Wikipedia predates Youtube by five years.
Unpaid cooperation of human to generate knowledge or entertainment predates YouTube by tens of thousands years.
YouTube is part of Alphabet, one of the biggest corporations in the world. It can easily afford to pay people. It isn't co-operation, it's a corporation which takes the work of other people and makes lots of money off them, without paying them properly (or at all in many cases). Wikipedia's content is used by LLMs and other such outlets who also profit off unpaid labour.
It is a basic right of people to be able to afford to live. It's easy to work for free when you have family money but you cannot support yourself when you don't.
> I'm in favour of people making money from their work.
That's completely fair. YouTube offers content creators many ways to do this. For example, they can put content behind a paywall. They can ask for donations. They can ask for memberships. Members get all kinds of fun perks. The part I have an issue with is YouTube advertising an ad free experience with Premium and then allowing content creators to fill their videos with ads.
> YouTube isn't paying people properly
I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly, and not allowing content creators to shit all over viewers. That's pitting the little guys against each other while Google laughs all the way to the bank.
You have to put in a disproportionate amount of work to get anything back. Almost no one makes money off a single video, but instead you make a string of videos and get a following. (The cases of a single video making money are few and far between.)
You don't get hourly pay for it, it's vaguely commission based and you do all your own promotion. They can demonetise you at a whim and refuse to pay you (I've seen this happen to craft channels and other content that wasn't remotely controversial.)
>I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly
The solution is proper competition to google. Because Youtube is pretty much the one true monopoly out there. But as we all know, video hosting alone is very,very, very expensive. It really is something you need to be a billion dollar company to do, and Youtube wasn't profitable until like... 2 years ago?
So I tolerate the user ad reads as the best compromise because nothing else would work. I don't think Youtube is a model where Google is being greedy so much as practical. At least not in how it monetizes creators (there's plenty of hostile means they do to creators as is, but the monetary structure seems fine).
There are alternative streaming platforms, but many of them have become associated with certain political viewpoints.
There is also a very limited range of content on Odyssee, Bitchute and all the rest. If you want to find music tutorials for example, you're unlikely to.
> To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
I think it's clear. I don't want YouTube going in and editing movies and creator videos removing any form of advertising. Maybe you want them deleting that content. But the average person realizes what Premium means by no ads. Being obtuse or willfully ignorant isn't reasonable.
This would destroy YouTuber culture AND rid us of ads on there. This is my own personal heaven. Nirvana. Eden. Promised Land. Paradise.
Let’s freaking do it.
More importantly, it would lead to more “product placement” and other underhanded product/brand promotions.
And the real annoyance with YouTube Premium is that the UI is still full of engagement dark patterns.
no it wouldn't, such things are straight up illegal in most places? You have to clearly disclose ads + have clear distinction between ad content and rest of content. A bunch of youtubers have gotten in trouble for this?
I worked on Prime during the rollout of Prime Video and shortly after (maybe a year or so) pre-roll for other Prime Video content was inserted. I brought it up in a meeting with our org (but the Amazon Video team wasn’t present) and one of our business guys shrugged it off as not interrupting content, blah, blah, blah. I said the agreement was ad-free content, not uninterrupted content. The conversation stopped and nothing was done.
I worked on backend subscription management and the implementation of benefits. The team that business guy worked on was the group eventually at the center of the predatory subscription issue (I can’t say whether they were still around when that happened or not).
Cheap corporate sellouts are the problem with every big company.
Pro tip. Ublock origin gets you that mostly ad-free experience you were hoping for. Donate the money you save from the YouTube premium sub to ublock origin instead.
Also, SponsorBlock. Can't recommend it enough. It even works on """smart""" TVs if you're controlling youtube from your phone.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock is the only way YouTube is even remotely watchable these days. Even still, it's not really worth it. I frequently find it better to spend my time doing anything else.
Oh absolutely - we banned “casual” YouTube use at home 5 years ago and we don’t regret it one bit. Still use it when looking up a concrete video on a specific topic or when a web page directs me to a tutorial or something there, but don’t use it for regular “entertainment” (I’m bored, let’s hit YouTube).
Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.
It's mostly AI generated drivel on their home page now.
Is there a viable solution for YouTube on a Google TV nowadays? They've started doing 60 second ads which are absolutely egregious.
SmartTube
Just get one of those Fire things. What's it called again? Ah yes
Get a Fire Axe. Put it in the TV. Enjoy life.
Sadly they don't accept donations, but send it to your favorite channel's Patreon or similar.
Thanks! It's great on Mac/PC but sadly it doesn't work on iPhone, Android TV and Apple TV. I have solutions for those now too.
Mind sharing them with the rest of the class?
Sure! On Android TV, SmartTubeNext is fantastic. Installation instructions are in the GitHub repo. For Apple TV the best option I have found is MuTube. It's basically a YouTube repack without ads and with SponsorBlock. The catch is that it requires sideloading or an Apple developer account. Sideloadly etc can automatically refresh certificates while on wifi, but I ended up purchasing a dev account because it works for all the Apple devices in my home. Which leads me to the iPhone. There are many YouTube sideloads. I use uYouEnhanced. As above, you can use Sideloadly or sign the app yourself. An LLM or coding harness can walk you through the process (or do it for you). With an Apple dev account, signed apps last for a year, so I don't need to worry about refreshing the certs.
SmartTubeNext automatically updates itself, but the Apple TV and iPhone apps don't. Surprisingly, it has not been an issue. They keep working fine without updates for the year. I just update once a year when I refresh the certs.
I cancelled my Spotify subscription when they wouldn’t stop trying to advertise podcasts to me.
> I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads.
That would make a great title for a write-up of your experience.
"Ad free" meaning we do not insert ads seems like a reasonable standard to me. The alternative of policing creator content is kind of untenable since it destroys the economics for the creators and there's so much grey area.
YouTube Premium now has integrated sponsor block. At least that's something.
And any ads underneath a video is at least not shown in the Roku YouTube player, nor are ad overlays as far as I know, since I've never seen one.
It helps but I understand that it's not automatic. Is that correct? If so it significantly undermines the functionality. SponesorBlock automatically removes ads. Meaning I don't have to scramble to open my phone or find the remote every time I don't want to hear/see an ad. That opt-out UX likely means most people ultimately watch the sponsored content.
It could be that this is a phased approach so as not to anger their creators too much.
For me personally it is as easy as pressing one button on the remote. But I don't put on videos in the background very often.
Worth noting is that there are thousands of high quality YouTube channels without any sponsored content. So those are effectively completely ad free with Premium.
I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.
Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks? That's a bit onerous. My commercial agreement is with YouTube, not with the video creator.
If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
YT Premium does provide the "skip ahead" functionality that almost always jumps over sponsor blocks.
I will say I've been a YT Premium subscriber for years and I've never seen any ads for other Google services in my feed, and I don't get advert emails either.
> I mean, the stuff that's in the video is not really under Google's control.
It is completely within Google's control. They have a hundred pages of terms of services, dictating everything the content creators may and may not do and say, down to individual words, symbols, and opinions. If Google wanted to, they could tell content creators to stop adding sponsorships. I understand you'd make less money.
> If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
I stopped paying YouTube and I use SponsorBlock now. You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
The problem is ultimately that Google advertises an ad free experience, which it's not. I'd be willing to pay for an ad free experience.
> You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
Ahhh but you're entitled to someone else's hard work in producing the content you watch, and god forbid they'd be entitled to compensation for that work.. Got it..
Rules for me, not for thee..
You're free to put your content behind a paywall. YouTube makes this very easy.
If google can't provide an ad-free product, they shouldn't be selling an ad-free product.
> Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks?
No, just mark the sponsored segments, so YouTube can skip over (like SponsorBlock does). And they already pay more per view from Premium users vs ad-supported ones, so it just makes sense to skip ads in the video as well.
That being said, I think paying creators directly is more sustainable in the long term.
All creators that are on Nebula already upload sponsor-free versions there.
Nebula is mostly irrelevant. Even Nebulas creators wouldn't survive without youtube revenue.
Maybe so, the point is there is a non-zero number of creators who already do sbarre thinks is too onerous.
I'd pay $20 / month for a Youtube subscription with no ads or sponsored content. Unfortunately even with sideloading on iOS there's no alternative live youtube vanced.
FYI I use (https://github.com/arichornlover/uYouEnhanced) on my iPhone (I sign with an Apple dev cert) and it's great. It blocks ads and has SponsorBlock built in.
Brave seemingly blocks YouTube ads on iOS.
That's like complaining you purchased netflix subscriptiomn without ads and saw a product placement ad in a movie. I guess you want netflix to not show the movie, start cutting up the movie or ask that the movie be remade without any products.
YouTube sponsor segments are not subtle “place a Coke can facing the camera” integrations. They are dedicated ad segments with scripted (typically by the advertiser) promotions, often entirely unrelated to the video or channel.
To the end user they are indistinguishable from other video ads on the platform except the ad read is often (not always) done by the creator.
I don’t have hard data on the ratio but it’s not uncommon for a 10 minute video to have 1-2 minutes of full-interrupt ad segments embedded in the video.
Sponsorship within videos at least gives money to the uploader. YouTube has forced that by demonetising videos or paying peanuts.
And then on the flip side you have people who won't blink an eye with Apple doing it. Shame, really.
What sucks is it’s never enough
It always gets more expensive for a lesser enshittified version, removed/fucked with features to keep a bloated product team employed
[dead]
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 ad 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.
This is a bigger problem than it may appear. The business lifecycle is well understood, whereby a company innovates, expands, and then when it has a sufficiently large customer base, it monetises. I.e. it enshitifies its products - making them more expensive over time relative to the value. This process is death by a thousand cuts. A PM might see that having the modal you hate show every time you load the site increases conversion by 3%. That's $1M ARR you just made the company! Wow! You get a bonus and a promotion! The problem is you erode customer sentiment by some undefined unit. Many people think NPS measures this, but it doesn't. That measures how many people love and hate the product. It omits the vast majority of people in the middle. They just add it to the increasing list of annoyances until one day there are so many annoyances that they leave. At that time it's very difficult for the company to understand why the user churned. It wasn't any one thing. It was a concerted effort over years to squeeze every cent out of the user at minimum cost.
> At that time it's very difficult for the company to understand why the user churned. It wasn't any one thing.
It's very easy to know for people inside the company who actually care about the product and for their clients. It is really hard for directors and VP that anything they understand are numbers.
If I say "hey this modal/pop up is making customers angry" they are going to ask how much they care (is there even an unit for that?) and how much revenue is lost. The only way for them to handle a project is creating a goal for next Q and assigning people, when in most cases what you need is actually the opposite.
The problem is not that no one knows how to fix it, the problem is that managers organize around big problems and become useless at improving the small things or details. They become blind. It happened to me 100 times. They do not want things to be fixed unless there's a clear revenue increase, which is stupid.
The concept is called "goodwill" and it can be recognized in the balance sheet.
Do you want to upgrade now or later? Will you upgrade now or do I need to nag you to death?
no
[dead]
I get super bent out of shape when Apple TV+ advertises shows before the one I am trying to watch; even sometimes advertising the show that I am trying to watch itself and spoiling things.
I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.
I've talked to Apple support about this. Their website says...
But you are forced to watch ads for other shows before viewing an Apple original. The support person said that because the ads are before the show you are trying to watch, that the show itself is indeed commercial-free. Language lawyering at its finest.Yeah, I actually canceled Netflix when they started making it impossible to look at the available shows without seeing previews of each of them. I am trying to leisurely decide what I want to watch, not have 15 different actors scream catchphrases at me.
I don’t see this maybe because my Netflix app is older (on a 2018-era Roku tv). But it is annoying as shit on my friends tv with chrome cast.
You can turn it off: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102. Does that setting not work for you?
My journey went from downloading movies and TV shows to paying for Netflix, Apple, and Prime. Then back to torrents to avoid all the trailers and ads and curated feed. It's so peaceful now.
Good for you. It's impressive how many get jerked around but don't do the obvious thing and cancel the damn service. More people should feel outraged and insulted by these shenanigans.
Well, you'd be surprised how annoying it is to be a curmudgeon these days.
You can't even find wired (aux) headphones... So tempering expectations when you finally decide to "go back" to simple things is required.
I like to buy my media rather than pirate (I am a man of means after all) but I can't even buy modern media.. Silo, Ted Lasso, Severance and Slow Horses do not have purchasable releases at all. At least some Prime TV shows have blu-ray releases I suppose.
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 and stop using their service, easy as that.
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.
> My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up
But now these are targeted ads based on browsing data for ad profiles linked to your IP and devices. IMO just a few of these are far worse than the general run of commercials we used to have on TV. Corporations obviously think so too otherwise we would still have that.
I remember those days, and when Cartoon Network was the same. I didn't mind it then because, like you, I found the promos were a great way to know what was on the channel at different times. Especially in the age before on-screen guides.
But there are a few crucial differences between then and now: The ad spots were there to keep the timetables accurate, which is no longer necessary. They also served as a way to let you know what else was on the channel, which again is no longer necessary because that app opens to a menu of all available programming. And, now this is the important part, back then I wasn't specifically paying for ad-free access.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, my Jellyfin server is about to get much more use.
I agree. I noticed recently an ad directly inside of 1Password. I’ve paid for a 1Password subscription since 2013, and have had a family plan for many years. I know the company changed hands several years back after AgileBits sold to VC, but this type of disrespect caused me to cancel my membership. There are plenty of alternatives that haven’t turned their focus to the “Enterprise” and aren’t trying to extract as much money as possible from their paying customers.
What would you say is comparable experience wise to 1Password? I’ve found particularly the 1Password Family plan there’s not really a good alternative of rolling with KeepassX, Bitwarden, etc.
The answer could be nothing and I still respect the choice to speak with your wallet.
Bitwarden, while not quite as polished, works well. If you have your own server at home you can even self-host, which I do. It's an open source server side app called Vaultwarden [https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden] which connects to the Bitwarden app.
I think the iCloud password manager also works pretty well, provided you're using Apple products.
If you don't need to share passwords between people (other than manually), Firefox Sync is perfect.
The closest I've found is Bitwarden, but even that isn't quite as good as 1Password.
The BBC in the UK makes a great play of having "no ads" but 6Music (their indie music station) has constant cross-promotions interrupting the music, sometimes for jarring TV murder shows. Cross-promotion is just as annoying as ads for insurance, I hate it!
Yeah, those kinds of ads are always aggravating to me because you’re not even making money by showing them to me. They feel like a display of power more than anything else.
One of the most egregious examples of this that's happened to me was with the DVD set of the second or third season of Mad Men. One of the unskippable pre-menu ads was for the next season.
And I didn't know what to say. Either I like the series and I'm going to buy the next season or I don't and I won't.
Yes I see those, and adverts for other services (watch this program etc) as adverts.
I don’t see adverts embedded in content as adverts. Be sure I’m watching the World Cup on bbc and see an advert on the players shirt doesn’t mean I want my money back, I’d rather we had no adverts, but it’s not unreasonable.
> Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not?
You are implying something false. That he’s suggesting thats not an ad. Hes not suggesting that at all.
What he’s suggesting is that that’s very different from Disney gating or interspersing movies with ads. Which it is. You may disagree with that but you’re strawmanning him.
If I use service X I am MUCH less annoyed by an advertisement of subservice X.Y than I am by an advertisement of Nord VPN and Raid Shadow Legends.
I may be an outlier but I don't really mind being shown a relatively short ad before watching something. I'm almost never really paying attention yet anyways. Like yes, I'd prefer it not to exist but it doesn't cause me to get into a fit of rage.
But ads in the middle of something I'm watching? Fuck right off with that.
It is an upsell. It is a sales tactic. Sales isn't the same thing as advertising even though they both are trying to get you to buy something.
> Does anyone not?
People turned a blind eye to Apple advertising it's own services in it's products for years. I saw people defend here, on HN. So, while yes, it's advertising, Disney is far from the first to do this.
I'm not saying it's right, only that people who claim to be opposed to ads are accepting of the type of ads we are discussing.
> if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?
I'm assuming they aren't showing you ads for the plan you are on.
An add, but no more than catching a glimps of a restaurant long after one has ordered. When standing in a shop it is normal to see prices for other products on offer.
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...
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
The original lawsuit was spurious to begin with because the restaurant wasn't even operated by Disney.
Incredibly irrelevant. By asserting their ToS this way, they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.
>they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.
That's just how lawyers work. They'll try to invoke any defense that's vaguely applicable, just like any plaintiff lawyer will try to invoke any cause of action that's vaguely applicable, like the plaintiffs in this exact case.
That’s not true in general. Plenty of jurisdictions do not allow you to use contradictory arguments in hopes that one is persuasive.
That sounds bad to me!
The TOS argument was so awful it deserves some kind of bonus loss, but let's put that aside for now.
Let's say I paint a fence, and my neighbor complains I ruined a particular segment that shouldn't have been painted. Why can't I argue that this segment was on my property and that my neighbor gave permission to use that paint on all segments on their property?
Let's say there's a 15% chance the survey was wrong about the fence location, and a 15% chance the court disagrees with how I'm interpreting the agreement. If I can use both arguments I have a 2% chance of losing, which seems fair to me. Both arguments are reasonable, so why should I have to risk it on only one?
In the context of this story (ie. US), it's specifically allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_pleading#Civil_law
Don't excuse poor actions by saying these sorts of people just normally act poorly. It's their choice to act unethically.
That’s not at all how lawyers or businesses work. The job of the lawyer is to represent the client. Lawyers didn’t ultimately decide to use the ToS in this way, Disney did. Disney estimated the reputational risk and calling attention to their morally (and legally) questionable ToS was worth the risk.
Stop infantilizing these people as if they have no other way to behave. It isn’t a law of nature that companies have to behave immorally. Hopefully you apply that understanding to your own job, too.
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...
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.
It sucks that Disney+ cancelled Bobba Fett and other great Star Wars series. One month at a time makes sense especially with the lack of new content that I want.
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?
"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.
No, there's nothing really to do. They aren't producing the feed, they're essentially hosting a stream from another broadcaster.
For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.
I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.
But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
Let’s reverse the situation, they were able to add ads to sport events, so they can definitely remove ads and show the main event cameras if they wanted to. But they’re picking up showing ads indirectly through some other service.
Who is "they" in this situation?
I noted that the streaming service, like Paramount+, would be able to overlay their own ads over the broadcasted commercials, but they won't have control over the cameras. That's on the broadcast station, they're the ones controlling the remote production.
Paramount+ can only rebroadcast what my local CBS affiliate is broadcasting.
I think only Netflix and Prime have deals to actually produce sports broadcasts.
I suppose it’s a response to this part:
> But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
I.e. instead of dead air, they could show some live feed in the spot that other broadcasters use for commercials.
Have you been to a live sports event?
What's happening in that time is just random bullshit. They'll run bits on the jumbotron, hold raffles, go play games with people in the stands, etc. All sponsored by "<SO AND SO>, the official <THING> of your <LOCAL SPORTS TEAM>". Or, in other words, ads.
You could show the players and coaches on the sidelines, but that's also rather boring. It'll be a couple of guys shooting the shit on a bench, or a couple of guys hunched over a table, or some guys warming up.
The best thing they can do is like information from other games maybe.
Honestly, I was going by my most recent experience, which was F1 in Singapore last year. (I’ve been in Singapore at the time, but haven’t managed to get to a good spot, so I was watching it online a couple blocks away.) That thing had ads every minute, but the race obviously doesn’t stop during the breaks.
> What's happening in that time is just random bullshit.
Are most sports events like this? It sucks then, but the playing games with people in the stands thing sounds better than just plain ads. Mix that with sidelines shots, some alternative commentary maybe (with some instant replays?), and sure, information from other games, and you get a nice, coherent broadcast with some ads from the stadium but none that are as out of place as the usual commercial breaks.
Ads consume attention, so I do prefer static. Then again, I don't know why people watch TV (at all) or browse without uBlock.
Does uBlock work on commercials aired as part of a stream/broadcast? I don't mean where they interrupt the stream and insert an ad, I mean that it's part of the video produced.
I genuinely don't know and am asking out of curiosity.
I wouldn't know, for the same reason: I don't see the point in watching a stream rather than something one specifically wants to watch.
Depends on the service.
Do like international broadcasters do for these things and opt out to your own presenters with analysis etc
I'm unsure. I believe I've seen Telemundo at certain events, but they could have deals to rebroadcast and they'd have the same options as Paramount+. They can run ads over the broadcast ads and swap the audio feed with their own. The broadcast feed should have at the very least; a video feed, a crowd/stadium audio feed, and the commentary audio feed. So they could just not rebroadcast the commentary audio and replace it with their own.
> 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.
A lot of the ads on the field and perimeter are themselves inpainted. And becoming more and more offensive over time, with animation and flashing and such as technical capabilities improve and viewers become accustomed and don’t revolt.
I'm sure somewhere there's an ad exec ready to rollout personalized in-game ads that say "hey Chris Morgan, try Henson's ball wash!" From data provided by your smart TV and your secret profile from data brokers.
I read it more as a contract issue rather than a technical issue
Our research shows that people with peanut allergies buy a lot of candy bars. We want to tap into that market, so we make a product call NoPeanutBars. But making them in a dedicated peanut-free facility costs a lot of money and extra work, and we really can't figure out how to do it. So we just put a disclaimer on the back that says NoPeanutBars may actually contain peanuts. What's the big deal? We don't put the peanuts in there on purpose!
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.
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.
They don't stop at terms and laws. They stop at what loses money, through customer churn or lawsuits.
Typically the only restraining force is a founder who cares.
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.
look we know 99% of people hate being tracked but we need the data to see if 0.1% or 0.5% people are clicking the links, you've got to be a team player here
there are execs and product people that care, but it's rare and they often get worn out
When I watch motorcycle races live on Peacock with my no-ab subscription they just go quiet for the commercial breaks that other providers/plans run. No announcers or on screen displays, but it does keep a live feed or the race. So the whole "we don’t have an alternative" part I do take exception with.
fwiw... I believe Peacock is also allowed to run ads during live events, but at least during my motorcycle races they do not. a couple seasons ago they would go to a peacock banner and not show anything during the commercial breaks, but at some point they switched to just showing the raw video.
I'll be clear that no I didn't - I read the announcement when Disney+ emailed it to me with no further context, plus adding this disclaimer was the reason for the email. So I disagree that this is our fault.
They mailed me too, and I did read it in full. There's a link right there in the e-mail. I read it, and understood it's not at all what everyone here is claiming.
The email contains the full subscriber agreement (which is also the link in the email).
The full text for that section:
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.
Perhaps you could share, from the email, what you read that everyone else is missing.
I don't mind self-ads especially if its like "Hey we're releasing this new movie in 2 weeks, are you aware?" just so long as I can skip them after the first time, and they are pre-cached when I open the app so you can download my movie / show in the background while this one plays. Guess I'm being wishful about good engineering. ;)
Even that is a bit too much to my taste. For self-promotion pre-roll kind of ads, if I can skip it the first time I see it, and I don’t see it ever again, and I don’t see more than one ad like this per day per series, then I’m reluctantly okay with that.
But ideally, just stick to some non-video recommendation UI during the credits, and let me discover things on your platform by myself otherwise, and don’t get in my way when I’m trying to enjoy the show.
Those are definitely ads and definitely not what I want out of a streaming service I am paying for. This is why I don't use Amazon Prime Video much, even Apple TVs subtle ads for other programs are distasteful and I get Apple TV for free, it still pisses me off.
Guys, guys, tthe cook only turned the boil up a degree or two, ypu cant even feel it!
Their alternative is to not advertise a plan as “ad free” if that is a lie.
> I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out
someone has to protect Disney from these unjust opinions!
> 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 don't like when I press play and an advertisement starts for some other freshly released content on the same platform.
I'd argue that since TiVo, if you're showing ads because "we don't have an alternative", you actually want to show ads or at least won't make any effort to implement a 20 year old technology for the sake of convenience.
When you select play on the media, does that media play, or some other bullshit get inserted first?
Call it what you want, if it's serving me content I didn't ask for, I'm not happy about it, especially if I'm paying extra for them to not do that explicit thing.
Why can't they remove the embedded ads with AI?
Sheesh ... they're a big company. This should be easy.
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.
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?
I'm not familiar with MLB, only with NBA. But even their "ad-free" really isn't - there are still ad banners inside the arenas, on the court itself, and on the jerseys, the announcers often read ads ("this segment was brought to you by ..."), and if there is arena feed during the regular breaks, the in-arena events like a half-court shot are often sponsored as well. Plus there's standard service ads that announce next games.
Unless MLB blurs/bleeps all of these, it's not really ad-free.
1. I hate the MLB one the most. I'm international so maybe it works differently but each season they come up with these horrible clips that they play on repeat. Sometimes it's a little short history snippet or this season some stuff about food. Problem is they have minimal content and so many breaks that by day two of the season they're tortuous. I'd rather have ads.
2. It probably depends on what sports we're talking about. Again, I'm thinking internationally where they've started showing La Liga this season.
> 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.
NASCAR has a separate feed for international broadcasts without their ads. During the ad break they'll just show an overhead camera or maybe an in car camera.
Yeah I'm familiar with that. I guess it all depends on the sport and country. Ads during the sport is quite unusual in the UK for example so we get that NASCAR feed where the camera continues with no commentary during US ad breaks. We also have a cool setup for Indycar where a local UK commentator jumps in to talk over the feed while the US goes to a break. For MLB (on their own league pass product) we get a blank screen or non-ad montage thing in between innings (although as I mentioned in another comment that's its own kind of hell).
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.)
Even in live sports, Disney fully controls ESPN, so they absolutely have an alternative.
Honestly Disney+ app is the gold standard. No auto play like Netflix. Classy and thoughtful design. Amazon is the worst. Those Buy Now buttons on commercials good God what a load of crap.
Well they do have an alternative. ESPN and I'm sure plenty of other live events will often play ads. But if you have a pihole or some issue that causes the ad not to play, the screen will just display something like, "Ad cannot be loaded. Event will resume in 1 minute and xx seconds."
Is that a GREAT alternative to seeing an ad? Nope. But in many peoples opions it sbetter than being force fed the same ads over and over when you paid for an ad free service.
And if you read the wiki in full you will see it also is talking about preroll content. I dont HATE the HBO pre roll ads for their own shows that play before I start an episode but it is still an ad. Its for content I might actually enjoy instead of for paper towels or insurance but it is still an ad. This is something that is entirely optional and that disney/hulu has decided doesnt count as an ad.
All that matters is the actual agreement. The agreement says there's an exception where "streaming rights or other limitations require certain Content to play with ads," and that "no ads" and "ad-free" tiers can contain "limited promotional content," with some examples of what "limited promotional content" might include, but no actual restrictions on it.
That's extremely broad. They won't show you ads, unless "other limitations require" them to? Would "our internal agreement between our streaming division and our content division requires ads" qualify? What would qualify as "promotional content" and in what sense is it "limited"?
This reads to me as "we can show ads anywhere we feel like it even if you paid us not to have ads." The only actual limitation will be their desire not to piss off paying subscribers.
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.
[dead]
[flagged]
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.
It's worse than that. Advertising is a vector for dumping who-knows-what into our minds. Would you let random corporate sponsors put whatever they wanted into your food after you'd already put in the work to choose what you're eating?
To me, my time has value, and my thoughts have more. A party whose goal is to interfere with both, and who actively schemes to interfere with the integrity of both is not merely greedy, they are a hostile actor.
It's like HN has been taken over by Redditors. Nobody's interested in facts, just righteous indignation.
> 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
Whereas you would never stoop to exaggeration or your own contribution to this fight since it’s already lost, right?
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.
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.
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.
This is part of why last year I mostly switched to just borrowing DVDs from my public library. Avoiding ads by not paying seems to do the trick rather nicely. The quality and variety is better than what I can find on any one streaming service, too.
Every year it gets more and more important to learn how to not be sucked in by a small amount of convenience. "Capitalism" has figured out how to abuse your desire for maximum convenience. You need to figure out what your price is for it, and stick to it like glue.
The funny thing is the sooner you get off of some particular convenience treadmill the easier it is to stay off.
The funny thing is, it may be less convenient but it's also more enjoyable.
Endlessly scrolling some algorithmic feed hunting for something to watch can be done without getting off the couch, but it isn't actually fun. Walking to the library with my family to return a stack of books and movies and check out some new stuff is one of the highlights of our weekend.
For anyone who's wondering where to start, I'd like to suggest that your library probably has a copy of WALL-E.
I highly recommend asking if your library has access to Kanopy. It's a video streaming service for libraries, and works on a monthly token system.
My local library has access to Kanopy, Libby, and Blackstone. And as a Canadian, I've got CBC gem as well.
The available library of films, documentaries, books, and so forth is enormous. All bereft of ads, and mostly bereft of slop.
For now at least:
https://ninelives.karawynnlong.com/p/the-coming-enshittifica...
omg. thanks for linking this. i had no idea.
kkr of all vultures is scary. libraries need to act quick to find alternatives and shut this firm out.
there’s a reason the mere mention of this particular private equity firm causes shivers to anyone who has heard of them.
Ugh. It's never enough, is it? They can't simply be happy making a decent profit and maintaining a reasonable customer relationship.
They always have to squeeze, crush, and destroy. Rob every customer, ruin every product, so they can enrich themselves.
Why DVD and not Blu-Ray?
They've got those, too, but I didn't feel like paying extra for a Blu-Ray player.
I love libraries but DVD are pretty ancient in terms of video quality
The seas are always open, friend.
You're not wrong. But the only solutions appear to be varying levels of being a free-rider, which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable. The long-term solution is probably to only consume locally-made goods and content, public-domain content, or vintage goods.
> which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable
And the difference from the current situation is?
Some longer amount of time, potentially. Point taken.
Consumers do seem less willing to waste time watching ads than before, though. Cable TV was insane.
It's interesting that I've seen this argument 4 times on hacker news, all in the past 2 weeks and never before. Really is quite a small bubble
I've made this argument here on Hacker News dozens of times over many years now.
It could be my bias
to what do you attribute the increase you've noticed?
You can cancel a subscription. That's how subscriptions work. That means that any future changes is not a concern for current offerings.
And I can't understand why hackers never acknowledge this.
I can put gas in the tank of my car. In the future, they might lower the quality of the gas - or even make it more expensive! That doesn't change anything about the gas that I will currently put in my car.
> you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff
Advertisers already know that a hundred percent of the population have $20 in disposable monthly income, because they can pay with credit. So they don't learn anything new.
I am morbidly curious of your definition of 'the population', could you elaborate?
So you don't die: The population in the regions where these subscriptions are offered.
Every region where a streaming subscription costs $20 per month, 100% of the population has $20 in disposable income per month whether they actually have the money or not, because credit is offered for consumption.
Every region where a streaming subscription costs $5 per month, 100% of the population has $5 in disposable income per month for the same reason.
The original argument I responded to, is a typical hacker trope and of logical fallacy that gets repeated infinitely. It goes like this: "Just because somebody spent $10 or $20 on something which I would never want to buy, means they must be extremely rich and extremely wasteful with their money. So advertiser are drooling and crawling over each other to get their hands on this cash."
If that's the case, then advertisers clearly must also target tattooed people as the most valuable customer group possible, since every tattoo is proof that somebody once had 50 dollars.
The gas analogy is a good one, because those fuckheads also shove advertising in your face when you're already giving them money for a product.
The issue isn't your ability to cancel individual services. The issue is the increasing difficulty of living life as part of society without constantly having advertising shoved down our throats.
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.
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.
I also question the extent to which this is true.
Lately I've been helping my mom downsize. She's got boxes and boxes of household goods that she held on to because it belonged to her mother or grandmother or great aunt or whoever. Basically just, when the time came to clean out the old house, dump the kitchen cabinets into a box, put the box in the basement, and leave it there for 40 years.
And the thing that's struck me is how much of this stuff is cheaply made and barely holds together. Sure, there's the occasional well-built item that resembles the stuff I'm used to seeing in antique stores. But mostly I'm just getting a lesson in how much survivorship bias informs my perception of 20th century consumer products.
If anything the real trend is the shift to plastic, which can be more durable but is also more prone to complete instead of partial failure and generally isn't repairable. e.g. a tin measuring cup might dent easily, but can also be bent back into shape. A plastic one probably won't suffer anything more than a scratch when you drop it, but when it finally does crack that's the end of it.
Speaking of plastic, so many people nostalgically remember Tupperware as a quality product that's much nicer than what you can get nowadays. But the truth is it was a multi-level marketing scam and their products were often contaminated with heavy metals. It used to be a lot easier to prop up a brand image in the pre-Internet days, when consumers largely couldn't talk to each other en masse like we do nowadays.
Say what you want about tupperware, but I just bought a set of ancient tupperware from a thrift store and even the second hand quality of it beats anything I have bought in the last 20 years hands down.
The challenge, though, is that you can't tell with the naked eye whether that vintage Tupperware happens to be some of the stuff that contains lead.
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.
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.
There was much more than just the high profile egregious cases though.
Most food adulteration is a quality issue more than a safety problem.
Buy old peas but put a little green coloring in is almost the exact same thinking as let’s replace the metal gears with plastic ones to save a dollar per item. The vast majority of companies doing that didn’t kill or seriously injure anyone.
Companies have always been doing this.
Whoa there, next you're going to tell me government action can benefit society
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.
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.
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".
It's simpler than that. To a public company, the product is the stock price, and the customers are investors.
Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.
The irony is, the PE of lots of tech companies implies 30+ years to earn back your money. Some of these companies enshittify at a rate higher than being in existence within 30 years. So I am curious how this will end up.
30 years doesn't matter; 90 days does. If you can make enough money back over that period by enshittifying the company, you do it, even if that means selling the thing whole.
I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.
It's not meant to be idealistic at all. There very much should be a whole lot more that goes into the decision to raise prices or introduce ads or whatever that might upset your customers.
It's the lack of competition. They know you're not going to stop paying them.
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?
"Pride doesn't increase shareholder value" - many execs.
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?
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.
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.
There's always competition for the consumer dollar, unless you are the only business selling necessities for survival such as electricity, gas, food, and such.
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.
Without copyright, almost none of the content would get produced, especially in this digital age of zero-cost copying, and “they” (the companies) wouldn’t exist.
I don't think that's true. Copyright isn't more than a few hundred years old. Humans have been making and performing creative works for thousands of years.
Did Shakespeare or Chaucer need copyright? What about da Vinci? And the cave painters of Lascaux?
Sure you may argue that copying had costs back then and doesn't today. Maybe that's the only difference but maybe it isn't. I think creativity and art are human compulsions. Not mere commercial endeavors.
All this to say: it would be a very different industry. But it wouldn't cease to exist.
We had way, way less, and less polished, entertainment a few hundred years ago. Without copyright, you would mostly only get productions like what now exists as fan/amateur projects. Virtually no creator would be able to make a living from it, other than from stage shows (theater/opera/music concerts).
> All this to say: it would be a very different industry. But it wouldn't cease to exist.
Copyrights are such constrained monopolies, though. More or less on the same level as how Nike has a monopoly on Air Jordans, but not on shoes in general.
One of the most interesting things about media consumerism is the extent to which people fail to realize that watching something else is always an option.
Nike here would have also bought adidas and new balance and vans and toms, such that most stores only sell Nike monopolized brands
watching nothing and going outside or barefoot is the real alternative
Same with sunglasses, and glasses in general. One company owns everything.
That's beyond hyperbolic. Yes there has been consolidation in the mainstream media industry, but I still have better access to more distribution channels than I did in the early 2000s. Especially when it comes to indie stuff.
Copyright is the cancer of the human culture. Always has been.
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.
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...."
This is, however, part of why we're trending towards mandatory ID verification to use the internet+ attempts to illegalize encryption and consumer VPNs.
VPNs only help you with Bittorrent piracy. The kind where you buy a set-top box is still most easily caught by a police officer seeing you using the box, or selling you the box, not by anything they can do on the internet.
You can route the box's traffic through a VPN.
You don't have to.
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.
The fare-dodging example is valid for recent movies and music but it falters for older stuff where "older" means "older than the original copyright term", i.e. between 18 and 21 years. Beyond that it is more comparable to charging a wind-fee to sailing boats or a current-fee to river runners: taking money for a common good. Copyright has been extended and extended again just to keep people from drawing a cartoon mouse or singing a birthday song and that makes current copyright terms just as piratical as the self-styled internet pirates who have no qualms about releasing movies the day they are premiered.
Here's a fix: bring copyright terms back to something sensible, say 15 years. After that point copyrighted material is free to use for non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes you still need a licence for another 10-15 years. Beyond that it becomes public domain, no licence required.
They should start making good quality products and charging a price people are willing to pay then. Do you realise piracy is just about the only leverage consumers have here?
It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.
> And that's it.
But there will still be demand for content, and people who are willing to pay for a non-enshittified experience. Piracy is essentially the consumer bargaining chip in an era of unprecedented centralization and monopoly power.
This is an argument for not pirating indie games or books from smaller authors. There's no way Disney sees people pirating and just stops making content. It is all they know how to do
> 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.
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[...]
The Pitt does get a lot of people to subscribe to HBO Max just to watch the show. Producing at least one compelling TV show each quarter has been HBO's business model for several decades.
Companies are profit machines that chase where money is. They grow like weeds in fertile spots.
It's on consumers to chose where to water, and consumers consistently chose the cheapest most immediately convenient shit. The Yin to "Corporations are all about profit" is the Yang of "Consumers are all about minimizing spend"
I can tell you with confidence that if you leave the consumer market and go to the commercial market (and especially the defense market), where they worship quality and reliability instead of "absolute cheapest option", the amount of enshitification and deceit drops dramatically, and you end up with some really solid (and expensive!) products. Consumers want an oven that costs $600. Restaurants pay $6,000 for theirs.
That doesn't really make sense here. This whole issue is about the more expensive options. "Consumers are all about minimizing spend" right, and that's why they have a cheap option with ads. That's fine. I don't approve of advertising, especially in paid products, but they tell you exactly what they're selling. But they also have a more expensive option with "no ads." And guess what, that's a lie!
Why do I buy the cheapest oven possible? Because I have little defense against oven manufacturers doing the same thing Disney is doing with its higher-end subscriptions, and giving me expensive crap. I'm often happy to pay more for quality. But that's becoming more and more difficult as reputational signals get hacked. When I sort by price and buy the cheapest option, it's not because I prefer price to quality. It's because I have no way to judge or discover the quality of the more expensive options. For all I know, they're just as bad, or worse. So I choose the cheapest option because there's nothing else that distinguishes them.
It used to be that the goal of a company was to compete in a market and gain value through performance in that market over the long term.
In the 1990s, several CEOs, including Jack Welch, realized how exactly things work. Namely, most shares are held by retirement and pension plans who employ entire companies' worth of people to find a way to diversify and hedge, and the reporting period for their earnings is 90 days. You had major chunks of corporate capital held by people who couldn't really care less about anything other than the line going up, and any way to do so within three months was valid.
Once a company has achieved a certain market position, the long-term and non-financial aspects of holding shares (pride in the company, an interest in the market they competed in, etc.) are unimportant, and the customer's opinion stops mattering as much. You can assume that enough customers will stay around through sheer inertia no matter what you do, and that includes breaking up the company and selling it for scrap.
Since most shareholders aren't really attached to any one company's holdings, they plan for customers to leave when companies do anti-consumer things, and if a company is broken up, they just take the earnings per share on that break-up and plow it into something else that sounds like it'd be profitable.
You have to do business with people who are operating in a spot below that market position if you really want them to care about pleasing you as a customer.
Welcome to the age of monopolistic capitalism, they know you have nowhere to run and all the competitors charge the same price.
For each service you feel that's enshittified, ask yourself how many real competitors they have.
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.
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.
Always cancel immediately after you sign up. Treat all streamers as one-month-at-a-time purchases and you’ll realize how much you’ve been paying for that you weren’t using.
The only "streaming service" we really use consistently anymore is Youtube.
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.
long time Netflix user, my experience using Netflix with ads is the opposite. I find watching anything on Netflix unbearable due to frequent ads. I’m about to pull the plug
I wonder if they're AB testing? I think I got 2-3 ad breaks over an hour and each was just two 30sec ads.
I don’t have enough spare time to waste 5% of “content time” for ads.
If you have time to 'consume' the 'content' on Netflix you have time for a few ads.
[dead]
They're turning streaming into regular TV again, absolute nonsense.
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.
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.
Didn't cable have ads too?
The amount of ads I see in life compared to the 90s is still drastically reduced.
Basic cable had ads, premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc) usually only advertised future programming in between programs, but nothing during a program.
They have a government granted temporary monopoly.
Permanent monopoly, because you'll always be watching what's current today, not 70 years ago
Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?
buy DVDs I guess
Not exactly, it's more like paying ten different cable companies at the same time.
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.
Except you can cancel it from the next month with a few clicks.
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.
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"
I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about.
It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.
Of course they didn't. That's normal when you develop a new app.
Funny, autoplay functionality is exactly why I don't let my kid watch those.
This comes across to me as judgmental (and you don’t know the situation of my kids and their screen time), my view is to each their own, it’s an option you can turn on/off as per your own preference.
Sorry no I didn't mean to judge, it's like you said, everyone has a different requirement. One should have control which is something the billionaires don't want to give away.
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.
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).
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+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all
A cursory search found that the first 3 subs I checked were the same cost or more than disney+ (HBO Max, Fox One, and Netflix)
Where I live HBO Max is 5,99 to Disney's 15,99 a month.
Context: this is a reaction for class action lawsuit against Youtube - https://www.classaction.org/news/youtube-premium-is-not-ad-f...
Meanwhile pirates don't see any ads. Make this make sense.
The system discovered that it's always easier to force someone to give you money than to offer something they want to pay for.
[flagged]
Taking the cash from a bank deprives others of the money. Duplicating a video doesn’t deprive another person of anything.
Piracy is simple: when you make your product more convenient than piracy, people use it. Steam is popular for a reason - no crap, enormous game selection.. it’s just better than pirating. Netflix used to be the same - great selection, no ads.. now look: terrible selection and price is too high.
If a production crew of 1000 people makes a movie and everyone pirates it, you don't think those people will be deprived of anything?
If I wasn't willing to pay for the movie/streaming service/etc then the objective answer is no.
If I would pay to watch it then yes, but I'm not going to pay money to a streaming platform only to watch ads.
Setting aside the fact that you didn't actually answer my question: the objective answer is not "no". That's just a frame and some assumptions you'd like everyone to hold in order to justify yourself.
I can’t speak for everyone else’s take on it, but I do feel like I addressed your question.
A significant portion of piracy is opportunistic as far as I’m aware, in that people say “well, since it’s free I’ll grab it”. The opportunity cost is effectively zero.
What I’m getting at is that if you have 100 people who pirate the film, perhaps only 5 of those might have been willing to pay to see it, if only there was a convenient opportunity to do so. No money was lost through the other 95 - their decision was between ‘pirate’ and ‘don’t watch it’.
Of the remaining 5, yes, it’s lost revenue, but that’s because there likely wasn’t a convenient service with no ads at a price where people think they’re getting value. It’s all about convenience at the end of the day - if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.
>I do feel like I addressed your question
The point of my question was to note that, if everyone acts like pirates do, then the people who make the thing make zero dollars, which would hurt them greatly - they will be deprived of something meaningful. So the idea that piracy does not do this at all is false.
Pirates violate the terms that the creators ask in exchange for their work, and get to enjoy content at no cost to them by free-riding off of people who pay, and then try to argue that this is Actually Fine because they weren't going to pay for it anyways.
"I wouldn't pay for it anyways" is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and it's a bad moral code anyways: the only difference between me doing an Actually Fine thing and an Actually Bad thing is my own personal judgment about whether or not I was going to pay for it.
>if it’s more convenient to pirate it then your service is going to suffer. You have be more convenient.
So you are conceding that the service will suffer if people pirate?
Regardless, that's completely separate from the question of whether or not mild inconveniences give you the right to enjoy non-essential-for-life fruits of the labors of others without compensating them for it.
The production crew is getting peanuts anyway. If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead.
Also maybe it's their job to come up with a business model that everyone doesn't hate. If they'd just syndicate to all streaming platforms, piracy wouldn't be a problem for them.
>The production crew is getting peanuts anyway
1000 people on a feature film, you're looking at about $70 million in salary. That's peanuts to you?
> If one out of 100 people donates them some money, they come out ahead.
In other words, you're conceding the point that they would be deprived of something if everyone pirates their work.
What sort of an argument is this? Just because you overspent on production doesn't entitle you to be paid.
Right! If the price is too high, I can decide I don't want to pay it.
It's quite a leap from that to "I personally think that an animator's salary is too high, and I have the right to benefit from the fruit of their labor, therefore it is morally acceptable for me to enjoy this film without paying anyone" or whatever.
His argument has all the intellectual strength of a newborn lamb.
In what world is everyone able or willing to pirate? I think your ad-absurdum is just absurd here.
>Duplicating a video doesn’t deprive another person of anything
This was the claim. I said what I said to point out that if everyone acted on this belief for a feature film, there would be a thousand people who ultimately don't get compensated for their work.
You are right: not everyone is able or willing to pirate. Piracy is only able to exist because of these people who pay for art. That's definitely true, and definitely different than the claim that no one is being deprived of anything.
What are they being deprived of when somebody who was never going to pay makes a copy?
Some were going to pay. They already want to watch the show badly enough to jump through the hoops of pirating it.
The motive of the pirate doesn't matter: they are deprived from the revenue that was circumvented.
No they can't be deprived of imaginary revenue.
They are deprived of the payment they asked for in exchange for someone viewing their work.
Also, "the pirate was never going to pay" is a far more imaginary thing here; it's an unproven claim (especially since it's often paired with "pirates would pay if it was cheaper/more convenient to access).
Regardless, it strikes me as a particularly arrogant kind of entitlement for you to violate someone's terms to enjoy their thing while telling them you think it's worthless.
I'm personally happy to pay to watch without adverts. I'm not willing to pay for adverts. If they only sell it with adverts, then I'm never going to pay for it. Whether or not I watch it, they don't lose a dime.
I understand the idea of refusing service you don't like, but there's just no way that disliking a service gives you the right to rewrite terms.
I dunno man. If you're gonna benefit from the hard work of others without compensating them, so be it. It's the pretension that you're doing something other than that, for motives other than pure self-interest, which really bothers me.
> for motives other than pure self-interest, which really bothers me.
What motives have I claimed?
You haven’t explicitly claimed one. If you have a motive besides wanting to see the thing without feeling like you stole something, I'd like to hear it.
> It's the pretension that you're doing something other than that, for motives other than pure self-interest, which really bothers me.
Yes, it's very hard for me to see your motives as being something other than pure self-interest.
Am I wrong?
Isn't that the whole point of the free market? Make the total cost/effort for something lower than the alternative, and people will pay for it. I paid for Netflix for ages when they had every show/movie that I wanted to watch, instead of stuff being fragmented across 20 services.
Sure, that's the point of the free market. But anywhere else in the free market, we don't say "I don't want to pay for this/deal with the inconvenience, so I'll just take it for free".
The only way people try to make this work logically is to talk about how a digital good has a nominal real cost - but that's a very different argument.
And they're taking a risk that the movie turns out bad. It does seem like newer movies have become mediocre because they don't want to take risks anymore.
They are deprived of the license fee they are entitled to for the copy made.
Cash is rivalrous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
A fancy word, presumably used in this context in an attempt to make the argument that stealing copyright material has no negative consequences.
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.
Because some people really want to watch some particular show. If so then good for them, idc what Disney does.
HBO, on their “ad-free” tier shows ads for their own content before almost everything. I reached out to support about this and they said they don’t count those as ads.
These companies are all scum. They shift definitions and make the service worse. I won’t be renewing my subscription to HBO over this (I’m upset I bought a whole year), and I won’t be opting for Disney+ in the future either, as it sounds like they are doing similar things (and more).
To me, “no ads” means “no ads”. I’m done with these technical definitions people come up with in board rooms to subvert customer expectations and erode product quality.
Ads are money laundering.
Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No.
Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.
"zip it cookie"
And I literally cannot log in to cancel my subscription. Caught in some redirect loop.
Really, people don't pay for 'ad free' .. rather, they do, but what they really want is 'interruption free', which I think is why Disney+ promoting their own content as part a stream is essentially perceived as an 'ad'. I personally think it should be considerd an ad regardless of it being your own content or not. I don't care if it's someone else's , or your content, it's an advert for that content.
Reminds me of the old Disney Channel that had tons of self-ads on it
The linked wiki focuses on a new user agreement from January 2025. A link to the referenced article might have been more appropriate:
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Disney-New-user-agreement-allow...
As far as I can tell, this new user agreement only applies to Germany, at least for now.
PSA: Soon german brand AVM will have dns blocking of advertising right in their routers (fritz box). Search the web for Fritz!OS 8.40 if you are interested.
Working in video ads has validated that I basically never pay for video or music services. 90% of dev time is spent optimizing the monetization path while the playback path needs to be good enough.
Anecdotally, appleTV never remembers which episode I was watching or the timestamp in the episode. I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV.
That said, IMO this is the only business model for streaming companies and content owners to see bucketloads of money, so it sticks. Also, free tier makes for easy entry.
But I would gladly pay $10/month for a seamless streaming experience (app and playback) where I just select a couple of titles at a time. Similar to the mail version of netflix, but without snail mail.
At this point, streaming a known catalog is a text-book system, albeit expensive in terms of distro and bandwidth.
> I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV.
That’s what all cable news, reality TV, game shows and sports channels are!
In my experience, I'm usually revising TV shows and movies that I enjoy.
Say I want to rewatch the office or snatch. I just don't have the patience for the dongle to wake up and refresh all the banner ads, then the app to load, then get ads.
I should appreciate how far technology has come that a tiny computer is running off 10W to connect to the internet to watch and listen to anything I can imagine. But in that moment, I just want it to work as smoothly as turning on a dvd player.
These days I feel like I get much better value paying for cable with hundreds of channels than I do any streaming service.
Disney, after having completely failed to appeal to the next generation, needs to extract as much revenue as they can now
The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.).
Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition.
A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.
Not sure this is as nefarious as it might look at first glance.
Disney+ supports a variety of content types - some of which naturally have ads.
A big example is the Super Bowl (coming in February), which has always had ads.
Why aren’t we raging at movie theaters? They’ve been putting ads before the content we actually paid to see for a long time now
At the movies I can grab popcorn while the ads play. And usually the ads are for other movies, often enough topical. Watching an action movie, get ads for more action movies.
If ads are playing on the TV, they inject themselves into your home. Especially kids now wanting to buy or watch that you didn’t get to vet.
i don't think i've ever seen a discussion about movie theaters online where people weren't complaining about preroll ads, going back a good 20 years when this started to happen :)
Bye bye Disney!
You guys are paying for Disney+?
Why am I even paying anymore.
Because you are a good little consumer.
This has the potential to seriously hurt their subscription model business
Use BBC iPlayer and you will see a lot of ads. Just for BBC content.
Use BBC from abroad and you see scam ads and the "which bar would you move to save the king" crap. They're not morally above this, only legally within the UK
Pirating is so back
I love this use of the word "agreement"
Stop. Giving. Them. Your. Money.
Remember: Cable TV started out as ad-free.
I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free.
Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.
There is no other reason to use this apps other than convenience which is keep getting smaller and pricier.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769395
Advertising is getting more unbearable and disgusting every day. Does advertising actually attract anyone anymore? It just pushes people away...
I bailed on disney when they went Trump and stopped Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Have not missed it.
Lol, no thanks. I'm back to piratebay.
> January 27, 2025
So, not new. Got it
[dead]
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).