Disney is gouging customers with a near doubling of subscription costs.

Waldemar_Firehammer@sh.itjust.works to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 1409 points –

Disney is raking its customers over the coals with a 75% price hike for their annual subscription (originally $80.) People wonder why piracy is on the rise.Multiple commenters are saying I'm off base about the 75% price increase. My payment less than a year ago was $79.99. Here's the proof.

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Lol expect MORE and MORE hikes. They know how much money you have, they want it all and they will not stop raising the cost because y'all keep paying it.

Yep, it feels like we're about to see the second wave of piracy, and more and more people are going to dust off their jolly Rogers. $80 was worth it for the catalog, but the price hike is completely unjustifiable. I've already canceled my sub, and I'm betting there will be plenty who do the same. A 75% increase is egregious.

About to see? My friend, we never stopped. Especially now, more people have started to look into self hosting.

I never stopped once I saw that the shit you pay for is not even yours anymore. Unless it's indie games, I just straight up download the game. Could care less about online gaming. (Thx ftp)

Can you point me in the right direction of where to start? My last adventures of file sharing ended with Napster and Limewire.

Well theoretically...

  1. get a vpn

  2. deluge (others will pile in with apps no doubt)

  3. go to https://privacysavvy.com/security/torrents/best-torrent-sites/

Once you get your feet back under yourself, you can start looking at usenet and such

I agree with this guy.

Look into usenet, sabnzbd (or nzbget) and the ***arr programs.

Cost you a max $10/month, depending on how serious you are at hoarding, and how far back you want to go.

If I were to do such a thing I would find myself quite happily served by the above without the need for a usenet acct, but of course this is an entirely theoretical discussion from the comfort of armchairs so reality may differ for various parties puffs pipe

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I thought this community had a megathread pinned with info answering exactly that?

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Naw, lots of us stopped when Netflix streaming came in full swing.

Anime was still not big when Netflix came in. Foreign movies were also not available yet either. Programs, music, and all that stuff was still hard to get if it was not distributed by a US company.

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Disney made a movie called Crater that was removed from their catalog after just two weeks. It is only available via piracy.

I haven't watched it because that would be illegal, but it's almost like they want us to pirate. Heck, I would never have heard about Final Space if the animator hadn't raised a stink after it got removed from the WB catalog.

It is only available via piracy.

You can stream it on Amazon. Disney sucks, but there's no need to spread misinformation to make that point.

For a while it did disappear. It only recently popped up on Amazon

Yo ho fiddle dee dee! It's a pirate life for me!

...Second? We've had like, 4 or 5 waves by now since the Internet started.

And a bunch of waves before the internet too! In hindsight dubbing media duplication "piracy" in the middle of a romanticization of the golden age of sail was probably a bad call for the media execs.

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Seriously. What is it going to take to get people to cancel? Stop paying overpriced fees until they bring them back down to cost that's worth it. Otherwise they'll just keep getting scammed and never stop. I just don't get it. Don't they understand how economics work or something? Or do they feel like they HAVE to have it?

I just cancelled my subscription. Would've cancelled it ages ago if it wasn't for my wife, but it's time for me to set sail on the high seas again

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Streaming platforms are all joining in on the enshitification process.

Soon, people will join one service for one month then switch to the next.

After that, they will all begin contracts to “lock in the price.” Possibly in bundle agreements with multiple providers.

That’s when the full transition to $120+ cable costs returns, but in streaming format.

Except for dropout, that one's worth every penny.

Never canceling that. I'd rather rewatch anything d20 over anything on netflix.

My wife and I have rewatched all of game changer at least 3 times. It’s easily the best $45 I spend each year.

Considering they're the one who pushed for decades to extend the Copyright period from the original 20 years to "Death of Author + 75 years" (so, around 125+ years), making the entering in our lifetime into the Public Domain of any of the cultural elements we grew up in pretty much de facto impossible, thus breaking the quid-pro-quo of Copyright Legislation, I'm surprised that anybody here sees the Disney Corporation as anything but Evil.

These people did more damage to freedom in modern society (as Copyright also affects things like Software) than anybody else.

I'm doing my part in opting out of copyright because fuck capitalism

I'd be publishing written works in the public domain but I like to be attributed, so copyleft will do for now, it's catchy

Honestly till death of auther I can at least understand as many creators like to make characters a part of their identity and after death they are dead how are they going to profit from the ip and what about the fans who I'm most cases can no longer enjoy new content and after saying all of that I probably only think that because of the ip culture created by the legal environment created by Disney

I think it should be a flat number of years like 20 years, giving the author plenty of time to exclusively control his IP and then afterwards they can still profit because they can still make things from the same IP and sell them to people knowing that they were the founder of the IP.

I feel like the death of the author clause gives a perverse incentive to murder the author so that their IP becomes public domain sooner.

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Copyright and patent laws need to die.

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Just built a 50TB Plex server, get fucked mouse

Same here. So much better than any streaming service. There's a small initial cost to get started but it's worth every penny.

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This is rich coming from the company that literally wrote "Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!"

It was the first thing that popped into my head, too.

I canceled last week. I paid to bundle hulu and Disney so I could lock in the year before the price hike. Hulu would never allow me to log in, I spent 7+ hours with tech support over the last month with them literally having me log in and out over and over without doing anything on their end. Never got logged in.

Several times they tried to sell me that I had to accept the ad tier or the one that included ESPN (which you know full well will get bigger cost spikes) despite promising I wouldn't have to change plans.

I finally told them to cancel and refund the days. I haven't pirated in over 4 years, because I finally make enough money and wanted to support content and have easy setup on products as my mom and daughter (outside of household) and my husband and son (in household) depend on me.

I started with a VPN and streaming this week. I will be working on jellyfin in the next week. They could have had my money, but they want to fuck around with my time, money, and content. I'm pissed and done.

I built out the whole stack: clients use jellyfin to watch media and ombi to request it (a friend uses overseerr which seems good too). Internally I'm using sonarr/radarr to manage the library, prowlarr to handle requests, sabnzbd and transmission to download stuff. Altogether this almost completely automates media request and acquisition.

It took a bit of figuring out docker, reverse proxy (using nginx proxy manager), DNS... I got it working though. Someone who has already done networking would find this much simpler but it was new to me.

It's dangerous because I didn't know when to stop lol. I started up some game servers for friends, wrote a borg backup script to periodically save all my configs (and game saves) to two cloud storage services, then started spooling up more services...

What do you use for cloud storage?

I've been kind of rotating services. I am saving <1gb of configs, game saves, and various other small files. I used Backblaze and AWS cold storage for a bit but that seemed totally overkill, so I started trying out regular consumer stuff and it's all the same really (for this purpose). OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox... I figured keeping local backups on a different device, and then sending two out to different cloud storage platforms was enough. I backup once a day and keep two weeks worth of backups remote, and one month local. I also manually send a biweekly backup to a friend, and I store his. That's when I restart the server, do updates, and if I'm unlucky spend a weekend trying to fix whatever broke lol.

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That sucks. Tech support can be so annoying sometimes. I'm dealing with it too, although in a very different area. I wish they made it at least easy to give them money.

Good luck with Jellyfin and the other things you'll be doing.

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I'm not defending them, but this was clearly always the plan. It was obvious they intended to enter the market just under competitor prices to establish a foothold and then later charge more and reset the industry standard in doing so.

Again, I'm not saying it doesn't suck, because it does, but this was clearly the Disney+ game plan since day 1

I knew this too but didn't expect it to go this high so fast. Oh well, I'll finish setting up my deluge headless + VPN gateway lxc and get back to high seas.

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Disney’s desperation is showing—just look at their stock price the past 2 years.. down 50%

I’m honestly surprised they didn’t raise their subscription fees sooner. Unfortunately for them it’s a double edged sword, which will cause a lot of people to cancel and quite possibly harm them in the long run.

Meh, might not hurt them, obviously their suits don't think so.

What they're trying to do is convert or lose low-value customers and make high-value customers and save bandwidth at the same time. Fewer high-value customers also has an impact on support costs.

I did the same with my little computer support business. Doubled prices and kept the solid customers.

I straight steal my media, so I don't have a dog in this fight. Actually, I'm a little stunned that anyone pays for this bullshit in the first place.

I did the same with my little computer support business. Doubled prices and kept the solid customers.

Who may now seek cheaper alternatives.

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Disney has for the last few decades positioned itself as a premium product at a premium price (think the entry costs for theme parks, cruises, etc.) much the same way Apple has. They clearly think their content is worth the premium, so they're going for it.

Also, a lot of their best films are going public domain in the coming years, so they need to maintain and grow their revenue stream somehow.

Shedding ABC, eliminating physical media, and increasing streaming prices makes total sense if you think the way they do.

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We canceled our yearly subscription in August. Haven't missed any of the content. I mean I've seen what I wanted to regardless. Just not from there.

We did that. Got Disney and spent months binging all the Marvell and Star Wars content then cancelled. There was little else to see for us.

A year later so many new programs came out so we re subscribed but found all the new Star Wars sad. Not sure when we might ever go back.

The Mandalorian had overall been excellent. Really enjoyed that series. Absolutely hated the way they dumped off a good portion of it in the center of book of boba fett. Was not as thrilled with book of boba fett. But it wasn't horrible. It just didn't have the hook that the Mandalorian did. Not watched any of the new series yet. But yeah they're just really wasn't enough to justify its existence. It could have just as easily been put on hulu. After all they have such a large investment in that too.

Do not waste your time watching Kenobi. That show was just awful. Ahsoka was pretty good if you watched rebels, otherwise it was simply meh. And, generally unpopular opinion, Andor was terrible, and took me 2 separate attempts just to get through it. Hell, if you haven’t seen season 3 of mando, even that can honestly be skipped. The Star Wars content overall, hasn’t been awesome beyond Mando S1+2.

Hard disagree on Andor. That's the best show Disney Plus has created.

Hence why I said it’d be an unpopular take, and knew I’d be downvoted, even though that show was immensely boring. There were cool parts, like the ship battle with the German dude, or the fact that Andy serkis is now officially 2 characters in the Star Wars universe. But overall I felt like the plot was severely lacking a good pace, and the acting was only so so. Plus, they never got me to actually like Andor as a character, so that dragged the show way down for me. But hey, different people can have different opinions. It’s why the Taylor swift movie made 100 million yet I’m not a big fan of hers either.

Ahsoka was pretty good if you watched rebels, otherwise it was simply meh

I come with a bias of having watched Rebels.

I still found the Ashoka story to he meh. And I thought that Rosario's and Natasha's acting fell short of what I'm used to seeing out of them. They felt restrained, especially when together.

That aside, the visuals and soundscape (music and effects) were outstanding, I was absolutely blown away. The fight sequences were well coriagraphed and well differentiated between all the different combatants. I also found the acting out of the remainder of the cast was very solid.

I'm still not sure how I fell about the night sisters getting there lore tired up with the spinners/norns/fates; but perhaps that the trope repeated in so many cultures is what makes it such a good story telling tool.

I support that take. The unique fighting styles were indeed quite awesome, especially between Baylan and Ahsoka. It didn’t help my review that I just saw the Honest trailer for the show, and they hit a lot of points that bugged me. Like Thrawns dad gut that they tried so hard to hide, but failed. The night sisters take was odd, and I feel like they falsely teased that the inquisitor with the mask (Rakan?), or the gold faced stormtrooper were going to be someone special. But that was likely me reading too much into YouTuber theories.

Hi, I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm changing the annual piracy subscription from nothing to 0 on the 31st of October. If you carry on then you'll end up exactly where you're headed. Thanks and have fun.

When streaming first came in I finally stopped pirating and felt a little bit better about myself. A couple years passed and I'm back to pirating, even built a Plex media server in the meantime.

You can just stream things for free.

Your local library has a copy of every kids Disney movie you could possibly want. No need to pay em for access to something your tax dollars pay for. And if you wanna go below board: just rip em and keep em forever.

What physical media do they have available?

Back when netflix first started, I subscribed to the 4 dvd plan. I'd rip and burn a copy of every movie that came through the house (if we liked it, that is). I was one of the few friends that had a DVD-R drive, and would make copies on request.

I still have an old case logic disk book completely filled with burnt dvds. I just built my first computer that doesn't have a removable-disk drive, and with that, I no longer have any way to play dvds/blu-rays. Not one disc player in the whole house.

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That's because more than 75% of the people affected keep paying. The results for Disney are Immediate savings on resources (less people streaming) and they still increase profits.

It actually is impressive how trained people are

Twice the price and half the quality you would expect. So glad I dropped my subscription.

I dropped my sub. Was paying roughly $7.50/mo for 2 years for the legacy bundle and they nearly tripled it to $18.99/mo.

Of all my streaming services, I literally do not watch ESPN, and barely use Hulu and Disney. I could justify $7.50 by stretching the definition of justification, but $18.99 is more than I pay for streaming services I use regularly.

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During last year, I watched two series (only murders, Andor) and one movie. Disney+ is convenient and I can share the account with some friends. But at some point, it's literally cheaper to buy the things I watch directly and then also own them. Set up a Plex instance and it's also easier to share with friends.

They've also said they're not going to do physical DVD releases anymore.

It's ok. I have a physical hard drive that manages to get content somehow and an app that connects to it easily

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I wonder what's gonna happen when people stop paying for these streaming platforms when its obvious the juice isn't worth the squeeze?

We'll they're screwed because they can't drop the cost to fix it. If they drop the price their revenue immediately dips by the same amount.

Yep, it's a vicious circle. We are seeing the streaming services literally eating themselves for (very) short term profit.

I’m okay with that. The golden streaming age was when there was one platform that had virtually everything available (early Netflix) for a fair price. That was also when many people gave up on piracy, because the availability and convenience was the same, and the price was fair as well.

Ideally this short sighted greed decimates all those streaming services again, collapsing all those spread out shows and movies into a convenient and affordable platform like it used to be.

At least music streaming services have largely avoided this walled garden crap, most of them have the same range and selection of artists and music available as the others because making music exclusive works even less than for shows and movies. Notably this has also helped to avoid undue price spikes because good competition is ensured.

Stuff like this is the reason I built a NAS a few years ago.

...and now I'm paying for power, usenet, search, hardware upgrades, and so on.

I regret nothing - I'm in control now.

I'm sure it's cheaper to maintain overall too, not including the one-time costs of hardware. Plus as you said, control is very valuable - and you get privacy, too! Nobody selling your usage data.

TBH, it would depend on how many services I'm theoretically replacing, and whether you count the people I've shared my library with. Before I went down the rabbit hole, cost was the motivation, but I'm long past that.

Between the usenet subs, paid search engines, power for a 24 bay server running 24x7, and adding a new drive every few months, I can't really defend it on a cost basis for my own use (though that's not to say it can't be done considerably cheaper).

Similarly, I'm giving my data to a handful of usenet search engines and 2 usenet providers my data (though I trust all of them more than the likes of Disney and Netflix)

With all that said, I've never looked back. It's a hobby project for me, I have total control, can help out my friends and family, and use the server for other stuff like private cloud hosting, home automation, network ad-blocking, etc...

Yep, looking at doing the exact same thing myself, albeit smaller scale to start with. I'm glad to hear you're enjoying the ride despite the cost, because I know I'm headed down the same path, lol. Cheers.

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Eh. They deserve it.

Always funny seeing rubes be like "it's on this streaming service" or "I don't have that streaming service."

You can stream pretty much anything for free here: https://fmoviesz.to/

All you need is uBlock Origin.

Seeing the discussion always center around paid streaming services just shows me how stupid the average person is these days. They're proud to pay more, for less. Lol. I guess that's why they're called useful idiots.

God bless you for sharing this. I will keep it to myself.

No problem!

I recommend sharing it for others, though.

Don't use streaming services they suck.

If you're gonna pirate at least do it properly, by downloading.

Lol, what?

For convenience and price, you simply can't beat free streaming sites.

The quality and experience is horrible though.

Torrenting always wins. But maybe you have poor internet and don't want to wait for a download (although you can watch a movie while downloading it.)

A Plex server with automatic downloading is way more convenient.

Usenet is even better. I have my *arrs set up to run both and tdarr transcodes everything to h265 10 bit.

I'm scared to do torrent man. I didn't care about it when I was in Indonesia. Now I live in Germany, and now I'm scared of doing it.

Just use a good paid VPN and bind the VPN network Interface to your torrent client so that it's impossible to torrent without the VPN turned on.

He's right, downloading gets you better encodes that prioritize quality over getting the smallest possible file to keep upload totals down.

But yeah you're also right, for 99% of people avoiding downloads is the right move.

Never had Disnkey, so this is more about Netflix. Back at the beginning, I didn't mind paying a fair price for a service that made discovery and streaming easy and convenient. Plus subscriptions going to fund more interesting content? Amazing! Yeah, it's a bit of platform capitalism, but the fees were reasonable and they spread the wealth in a way I agreed with.

I'm still not against a service that keeps its fees reasonable for what it's providing.

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I’ve been a paid subscriber since day one but canceled yesterday when I got this notice. I’ll just pirate whatever looks good going forward, between the arrs and Plex it’s actually a better experience anyway lol

I’m a monthly subscriber and didn’t get a notification that my price was going up this month which made it pretty neat when my charge went through.

There's no unjustification for piracy anymore. If you're gonna charge me this much to use your shitty streaming services that I use once in a blue moon then don't cry when I instead download an mp4.

People were complaining about cable costing that much - now a single streaming service does. We have gone from "hmm, maybe it's easier to just pay Netflix 12 bucks a month" back to "this shit is too expensive, I'm gonna pirate my media"

Entertainment companies just can't seem to figure out how to deliver content to us in a convenient and affordable way.

What the fuck math are you people doing? It went up from $110/year to 140/year. That's a 20% increase. Still shit....but where in the fuck are you people getting a 75% increase? Just fucking google it and you'll see that OP is completely wrong...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/disney-plus-price-hike-what-it-means-for-your-next-bill-and-ways-to-save/

I paid $ 79.99 less than a year ago. If they hiked it from 80 to 110, then hiked it again in less than a year that makes their practice even worse. They saw no dip in users so they thought they could go back for another bend over the bar.

See my edited post to see proof.

They raised the price a year ago too. I suspect OP is like me and paid for a year right before last year's increase.

I paid $80 last year. I've got another month before it expires and it would then be $140. If they have raised the price in multiple increments throughout the year doesn't change the fact that it's 75% more expensive for people renewing over last years price.

Whatever, 20% or 75% price increase still is the same $0 increase a year because you wouldn't give your money to Disney

I was paying 69.99/year, that's the math I'm using. Don't know how you got such a bad deal.

I had to go double check what I'm paying. £96 for the middle tier (1080 not 4k I think), this is approx $116... So sounds like you guys were previously on a better deal (assuming same library access)

You can't compare been regions. Most outside of the US get a way more extensive library.

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Happy 100th, anniversary, Disney! /s

Double the price and if fewer than half unsubscribe, there is a net gain in revenue.

And a drop in costs too since their system has to support less users.

The lowest common denominators dictate the market, Netflix has best sales in recent years for hiking and consumers couldn't live without it and now Disney is wanting a taste, and I'd imagine it'll work out well for them.

Disney especially has all but totally captured their target demographics, and not many working parents are likely to put the time into setting up a Plex and torrenting movies for their kid(s). Sadly, it's easier to shell over an unreasonably large fee, and let their kids have at it.

I really don't think $11.67 a month counts as an unreasonably large fee.

Death by a thousand cuts though. I had to sit a co-worker down and go over his finances because he never learnt at home or school. The amount of €10-25 monthly subscriptions this guy had meant he spent about €500 per month on those. On top of buying everything on payments because he never has any savings.

It's another example of making use of the flawed human psyche which can't keep track of the little things.

It's unreasonable in the context that while streaming services were intended to be an affordable alternative to cable without sacrificing content variety, having the same level of variety now requires four or five subscriptions. Not an issue unique to Disney, but they and other movie studios have hiked movie rental costs, along with maintaining unreasonable pricing for BluRay releases, as a means of inflating the valuation of their IP catalog.

The fact that — in contrast to having four or five subscriptions over the span of two years— it's economical to run one's own 16TB or 32TB capacity media server (and even subsequently pay for replacement hard drives as needed) demonstrates that the subscription platforms, able to run such servers far more economically per user than anyone can do themselves, are retaining excessively high profit margins in contrast to the compensation paid to the people actually involved in producing content.

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The issue with price-hikes for subscriptions to me seems like it was always inevitable, and a no-brainer to solve. Disney, Netflix, and Hulu have no reason to lower their costs as long as people set-and-forget their subscriptions. The obvious solution is to stop subscribing and to buy a single month from a single service when you have a number of shows/movies you want to watch.

Paying $20 once per year to watch all the newest Marvel and Star Wars shows and movies in the span of a month at the cost of avoiding spoilers at release is a solid deal if you ask me. Paying $20 every month because you want to feel like you “own” the library of Disney’s media is a horrible decision.

I'm still incredibly angry at Disney+ for gutting watch together. I have a Plex server that I use quite a bit that I suppose will be getting even more usage now.

Yeah, what the heck happened to GroupWatch?

Idk if they ever said why they were doing it, but they canned it about a month ago.

Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free You are a pirate!

Yar har, fiddle de dee Being a pirate is alright to be Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free You are a pirate!

I'm so glad I don't pay for Disney Plus... I've had it for free coming up to 3 years now - almost expiring? Upgrade my phone contract (sometimes for cheaper than my current costs) and get 3 to 6 months free Disney Plus, and I can upgrade as often as I want/need to.

When my partner bought a new phone from Samsung she got full year of Disney Plus, that ended a few months ago so we used the same offer that I got for my new phone.

(Have been able to choose a different reward to Disney Plus during that time).

Once that ends I'll be back to using my phone contract but definitely don't plan on paying for it. I'll sail the high seas before I ever pay for Disney Plus!

it makes me chuckle at all those who once had a physical collection and sold them or gave them away in favour of streaming... who's laughing now loser's 🤦‍♂️

Going to be honest, I don't really care that I got rid of my VHS tapes and 480p DVDs.

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Fuck I'm still glad I don't have to waste space on a physical collection anymore. It 100% sucked ass having all that shelf-space full of CDs and DVDs/blurays.

Kept all mine, turned it into a Plex server w/o pirating, laughing in no monthly subs. Plus charity shops sell blurays for barely anything.

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The prices change for the consumers. What never changes is the pay for Disney executives and shareholders. Their pockets of cash always go up and up 📈📈📈

Just canceling and not watching things is also an option. There's so much stuff out there to do, you'll probably never get bored.

Not worth it. I had Disney+ for the last few years and of all the streaming sites it had the least in its catalogue and the least rotation of new stuff.

Just as doctor who is about to land.

If i had to pay to see it, i would be deeply pissed.

Set sail for the content of faceless megacorps last year already.

Hmm how fitting, I just paid another 3 months of Real Debrid for 9 Euros... And guess what, I can see the cancelled (and removed) Disney media there! (If I wanted to).

Piracy is the only good way to consume media, man even the customer support is better!

Hello dear sir,

Your Jellyfin account is expiring in two (2) days as your credit card information is invalid. To avoid account termination please visit this link to update your payment information:

chase-titty-bank.com/login.aspx

I'm only keeping it to share with my parents, the second they follow Netflix’s new policy on password sharing though I'm out

It's coming. I've been using my sisters D+ account, but she got notice that they're cutting off account sharing as of the end of October (in Canada at least), so back to sailing the high seas for me.

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Not sure how you missed out last time they increased the subscription cost. You must have renewed immediately before the increase from $80. That said, I'm out. The Android TV app has been having annoying audio issues and I've already cancelled every other service because of pricing.

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Me who never enjoyed their content. "You guys were paying for Disney+?"

It's families. Dual income with several kids, yeah the fees sting, but when your cashflow is high and your savings nil, $200 a year doesn't sound crazy. It's not smart, and it's not fair, but if you know any parents of young children you can see how they could make that decision.

My partner drives our neighbour's kids around sometimes, so we rack up seats on family streaming accounts that way.

Haven't streamed anything from there since Mando season 3 anyway

I think Loki was nice. Au least it was nice to look at. For Star Wars I recommend "Andor" which is maybe the best Star Wars ever made (of one removes the nostalgia-factor from the original trilogy). But seeing the rest on Disney+ Andor seems like an incredibly unlikely fluke. The one thing that luckily sneaked by the Disney content police. The one thing that wasn't dumbed down by endless focus-grouping and insertions of memberberry-characters and -items.

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I'm on some Disney Plus deal to get 3 months for 99 cents per month. You'd better believe the second the 3 months is up I'm cancelling again. Let's face it, the platform is kind of dogshit and while there is an occasional good show, most of the new content is dreck. A month a year is sufficient to catch up on anything worth watching.

in their defence they got that free 2-day shipping. I never watched Mickey Mouse Club when it was free

Feels like an egregious misuse of the word "gouging" but I understand the sentiment.

How so?

The term is generally reserved for, especially in legal cases, goods that are required to maintain a minimum quality of life but are in finite supply. If you were to suddenly increase the price of food, water, or communication technology during a widespread emergency, you would be committing a very clear case of Price Gouging and in most places found in violation of the law.

However, Disney+ Streaming service is the epitome of a good that is NOT necessary to live. It's a minor luxury with no positive impact on the consumer.

Got it. I learned something new today, thanks!

Unsub'd. Fuck that noise, I really only use them for Simpsons reruns between movies I give a shit about. So now I'll steal the Simpsons and the movies. They overplayed their hand here.

Hm. Content on there is so lacking and we already use it so infrequently.... If I had to choose between this and Netflix, Netflix stays.

Thanks for the reminder to cancel! Ridiculous price for the amount of content they put out.

Is physical media still available for most Disney stuff? How viable an alternative is that now?

I already cancelled my subscription. I’m going to the subscription hopping plus piracy route now for D+.

These streaming companies are dreaming. I hope people will just stop streaming. There will be massive street markets for hard drives and thumb drives loaded with pirated content.

I would love for there to be a consumer protection law, whenever a price changes for recurring service, the customer must affirmatively and proactively agree to the new price otherwise the service ends.

No surprising people with price increases,

Heard the price hikes such platforms led to an increase in the amount of grass being touched