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Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions

509 points · 372 comments · DeepLogin

lordleft · 1789987740 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. laughing_man · 1789987990 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. usrbinbash · 1789988117 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    scotty79 · 1789993724 · focus · HN ↗
    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".
    mrguyorama · 1789998801 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    koe123 · 1790005541 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    lenerdenator · 1790005697 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. zmgsabst · 1789993348 · focus · HN ↗
    I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.
    laughing_man · 1790101621 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
2. kuerbel · 1789988448 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. Leonard_of_Q · 1789990026 · focus · HN ↗
    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...."
    applfanboysbgon · 1789990577 · focus · HN ↗
    This is, however, part of why we're trending towards mandatory ID verification to use the internet+ attempts to illegalize encryption and consumer VPNs.
    mitxela · 1789990740 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    triceratops · 1790014360 · focus · HN ↗
    You can route the box's traffic through a VPN.
    mitxela · 1790029513 · focus · HN ↗
    You don't have to.
    kuerbel · 1789991041 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    applfanboysbgon · 1789991708 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    mitxela · 1789991984 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Leonard_of_Q · 1789992278 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Larrikin · 1790005940 · focus · HN ↗
    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
  2. fn-mote · 1789991000 · focus · HN ↗
    > 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.
    kuerbel · 1789991709 · focus · HN ↗
    That is not at all supported by evidence though. You might do that but it's an anecdote.
    E.g this survey: <a href="https://www.nexttv.com/news/a-hit-driven-biz-40-of-consumers-sign-up-for-an-svod-service-to-watch-a-specific-show" rel="nofollow">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:
    <a href="https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-235725" rel="nofollow">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[...]
    gamblor956 · 1790016735 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
3. happytoexplain · 1789988853 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. sarchertech · 1789990627 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    malfist · 1789991877 · focus · HN ↗
    Whoa there, next you're going to tell me government action can benefit society
    happytoexplain · 1789992493 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    sarchertech · 1789994586 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  2. bunderbunder · 1789998674 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    alt227 · 1790003812 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    bunderbunder · 1790004364 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
4. mitxela · 1789990662 · focus · HN ↗
  It's the lack of competition. They know you're not going to stop paying them.
  1. mrweasel · 1789991156 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    mitxela · 1789991866 · focus · HN ↗
    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?
    triceratops · 1790014033 · focus · HN ↗
    "Pride doesn't increase shareholder value" - many execs.
  2. kypro · 1789991306 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    Quothling · 1789992442 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
  3. carlosjobim · 1790006470 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
5. matheusmoreira · 1789992835 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. scotty79 · 1789993613 · focus · HN ↗
    Copyright is the cancer of the human culture. Always has been.
  2. layer8 · 1789997828 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    triceratops · 1790014110 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    layer8 · 1790017381 · focus · HN ↗
    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).
    triceratops · 1790017924 · focus · HN ↗
    > All this to say: it would be a very different industry. But it wouldn't cease to exist.
  3. bunderbunder · 1789999578 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    8note · 1790002447 · focus · HN ↗
    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
    bunderbunder · 1790003973 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    jawilson2 · 1790009786 · focus · HN ↗
    Same with sunglasses, and glasses in general. One company owns everything.
6. lp4v4n · 1789998682 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
7. WarmWash · 1790000471 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. wat10000 · 1790008819 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
8. lenerdenator · 1790005568 · focus · HN ↗
  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.

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