So they are _adding_ a new plan that's cheaper and ad-supported, and they are not touching the current plans. So nothing will change for my current subscription plan thankfully.
> Disney+’s ad-free subscription tier, which currently costs $7.99 monthly and $79.99 annually, will remain available.
and this:
> What’s more, if the Disney+ profile being used is associated with a child, no ads will play.
A clarification for the advertising to kids things. Looks like it's no ads to preschool kids
> Regarding kid-targeted ads on Disney+, Ferro said, “Yes, we’re going to have advertising… to kids, but it’s going to be controlled advertising with a lot of parental levers to pull. We’re not going to collect data on that.” She added that there won’t be advertising in preschool content on Disney+ at launch.
> Disney+’s ad-free subscription tier, which currently costs $7.99 monthly and $79.99 annually, will remain available
But it will not remain available at that price. Instead that's what the plan with ads will cost, and the prices of the current ad-free plan will be bumped up by 30%.
And that ad-free plan will eventually have ads. Ads are infectious and will always spread uncontrollably once you let them in. Give an inch and they will take a lightyear.
oh I missed that, I'm only just finding out about this now. Can you point to where you read that?
I just found this contradiction to what I had mentioned earlier (going to edit my original message)
> Regarding kid-targeted ads on Disney+, Ferro said, “Yes, we’re going to have advertising… to kids, but it’s going to be controlled advertising with a lot of parental levers to pull. We’re not going to collect data on that.” She added that there won’t be advertising in preschool content on Disney+ at launch.
> So they are _adding_ a new plan that's cheaper and ad-supported, and they are not touching the current plans. So nothing will change for my current subscription plan thankfully.
Fundamentally the problem with paying for ad-free content is that the people who can afford to pay for it are the people advertisers want to target.
Now. Just like when food companies sells the same package as before (or a slightly bigger version) as "now with 20% free product!" and after a few months, they remove the free product discount. Price increased, less people noticed it.
> The Dow giant still expects Disney+ to be profitable in 2024.
Disney+ isn’t profitable once you take into account “transfer payments”. They may not be profitable at all yet. But they specifically mentioned being profitable including transfer payments.
That basically means that when Disney movie studios use to sell streaming rights to another company - say Netflix. They may make for instance $500 million (made up number). Disney+ still “pays” the Disney movie studio $500 million. It’s counted against Disney+ profits. Of course the Disney company as a whole keeps most of that money. But it still has to pay part of it to the actors, producers, etc who have a revenue share agreement.
It was a big point of contention when Black Widow was released.
That's text-book financial engineering. I understand the creators' concerns, especially the ones that signed contracts before Disney decided to create Disney+, but on the Disney side I really don't care. It's more, I'm explicitly hostile to it due to the balkanization of streaming platforms now that every big producers start to have their own end-user distribution, subscription-based service.
It’s not “financial engineering”. It’s standard managerial accounting. I’m an MBA drop out and studied this over 20 years ago (undergrad in CS. The dot com boom called my name). In most large organization, different departments are separated into “cost centers”. Managers are often responsible for their own profit and loss. Internal “costs” are assigned to departments working together.
Why should the Disney+ manager get credit for making $450 million in profit by causing Disney Movie Studios to lose $500 million? How is that good for the overall business? Again I’m completely making up numbers.
We had a method to pay one bill and get all of the content you wanted - it was called “cable”.
They're just actually introducing the ads at the current pricing level, and adding a higher "no ads" level. Of course they would have ended up there soon enough anyhow, but they're just doing it immediately.
