Disney to Crack Down on Password-Sharing Too
Archived version: https://archive.ph/w8JRj
Effective October 12, the company will raise the monthly price of its ad-free plans Disney+ and Hulu plans by more than 20%.
The Disney+ ad-free plan will rise by 27% to $13.99 a month in the US, up from $10.99. That's double the $6.99 monthly cost Disney charged for the service when it first launched in 2019.
Hulu's ad-free plan will increase by $3 a month, or 20%, to $17.99 a month. The ad-supported tiers for both services will remain at $7.99 each.
The price hikes come amid Disney's continued efforts to slash $5.5 billion in costs this year.
The monthly prices of its two Hulu live TV packages will also increase by $7 each for both the ad-free plan and the ad-supported offering. ESPN+ will go up by $1 to $10.99 a month.
Additionally, Disney announced that starting September 6 subscribers in the US will have access to a new ad-free bundled subscription featuring the ad-free Disney+ and Hulu services for $19.99 a month.
In my case, sharing Netflix with family members by paying the extra fee is still cheaper than paying the full price by ourselves. We split the full price of the Netflix subscription, including the extra fee, so we end up paying less than the full subscription price. I do it mostly because some of my kids' shows are only on Netflix. We also split the Disney+ and Spotify bills, to everybody's benefit. Is that smart, since I'm saving money? Or stupid because I'm not helping some armchair crusade against big bad Disney/Netflix?
You are well within your rights to pay for that since it fits your family's needs. But, describing it as saving money glosses over that it's a result of a change in the terms of service. Netflix used to gloat about not caring that people were password sharing. They backtracked on that pretty hard.
I cancelled Netflix after they cracked down on password sharing because I'm a home of 1 screen. If the only option for 4k viewing is a 4-screen subscription that I can't share, then that's a ripoff as far as I'm concerned. If they'd offered a cheaper 4k, 1-screen subscription option I would have considered sticking with that. Ultimately, I probably would have cancelled as soon as the strikes happened just to support the creators, but that would be a separate decision from the password sharing stuff.
I agree with everything you're saying. I was more answering to the comment above calling people stupid without any sort of context for why one could possibly choose to pay for these services.
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Cheers :)