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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

Similar situation here in the UK.

Disney+ initially available at what I considered a fair price, and now they want to hike it by something like 50% - which seems totally unreasonable.

Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not included in the monthly fee - they want to extract even more money from us! And I take issue with the actual pricing here too, for example Mulan was a whopping £20 - for comparison, an adult cinema ticket is around £10! So again, this feels totally unfair and unjustified.

Disney is meant to be about "fun", but I don't think we'll be renewing, because, frankly, they are taking the piss and making me hate the service.

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My approach now is to rotate. We keep Crave which has HBO and Showtime. We paused Disney and Netflix and will turn back on, watch for a few months to catch-up on Tiger Kings or Wandavision. You can cut a lot of your costs and not have to torrent. Just keeping the subscription going doesn’t seem to be good value.

Wait till they make that loophole unpractical.

How?

For example by disallowing suspending the account more than once a year or completely. Another way, if someone is trying to cancel a second time (instead of suspending) they start security theater («Your behavior is suspicious, we need to make really really sure that it's you who want to cancel»).

A lot of the big titans in the streaming biz are already whinging about account sharing[0], so I wouldn't be surprised if they start complaining that people aren't "committed" enough to their streams as well, too.

It'd be way easier to cut down on stream cycling than account sharing, too - just jack up the monthly price and make the annual price cheaper.

[0] which is particularly rich because they sell multi-stream plans that are almost practically built for it

Can easily imagine yearly subscription becoming $120 and monthly something like $29.

So did we until the kids got old enough to have a say. Perhaps that is Disney’s thinking, they’ve got the kids roped in and exhausted parents willing to spend.

I've been doing the same. Usually I stay 2-3 months in each before running out of stuff.

Unless you need to watch the viral stuff as soon as they are released and people start talking, this is more than fine.

> Disney+ initially available at what I considered a fair price

It was a completely unsustainable predatory price aimed at making initial marketshare.

Disney+'s price target is roughly £30 per month... As is Netflix's.

I would respectfully disagree - the pricing felt fair, yet sustainable to me.

I see Disney+ as an "add on" streaming service - something you might get on top off either NetFlix or Amazon Prime, and as such I'd expect to stream far less content from Disney+. Even with 2 young kids, this has indeed been the case.

the pricing felt fair, yet sustainable to me

Sustainable in terms of maintaining the same old catalogue indefinitely? Or sustainable enough to finance new films and series? That's the problem. The existing catalogue costs almost nothing to stream while new shows cost a ton to produce.

Creating content is somewhat expensive, but not unreasonably so for their subscriber counts.

A live action TV show costs $3-15 million to produce. They have ~116 million subscribers. If they “invest” $2/subscriber/month into new content, that means they can make 15-77 new episodes per month (a film could be considered to take up several episode slots).

Shang-Chi cost $150-200 million. Avengers: Infinity War cost double that. That’s just two of the many films they’ve produced over the past few years. Look at their upcoming schedule for Phase 4 [1]. It’s extremely aggressive! And that’s just Marvel cinematic universe films. It doesn’t include Star Wars or Pixar or any mainline Disney films, nor does it include any TV series.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_Cinematic_Universe:_Pha...

For perspective depending on how you count Disney+ is Disney’s 4th streaming service. Their all about making people pay as much as possible at the cost of convenience.

Avengers infinity war isn’t an exclusive on any of their streaming services making it’s cost to produce meaningless. Disney is all about milking content with ultra cheap sequels / derivatives and old content, that’s what’s going to be included on Disney+ not a new 100+M dollar film. Remember they have had several Cable channels for years they know how to make cheap content.

That said, they could easily pay for several big budget movies per year as Disney+ exclusives without upping it’s initial price. Instead they have zero interest in being good value for money rather than maximizing profits and minimizing risks.

I just want to comment at how sad it is that so much money is being wasted on movies like this. It feels like society has irrecoverably shifted to some different reality and thus the studios keep focusing on these films. I was extremely emotionally invested in the success of a recent film by my favorite director: Edgar Wright. The movie "Last Night in Soho" had a supposed production budget of ~40 million but only earned ~4 million on Box office open. It was competing with all non superhero films for scraps because ~90% of the box office profits were taken by the superhero movies/007.

Yes - but it's likely they'll be releasing those in cinema's and not doing premiere's on Disney+ as they did during the lockdowns.

> the pricing felt fair, yet sustainable to me

To be blunt, what you felt about it wasn't really relevant. It wasn't sustainable in terms of revenue, and was a fragment of what Disney received from their previous licensing deals. It would not even cover residuals for existing content, never mind new production.

The average household spend on content is about $60pm, and that figure in real terms is surprisingly stable.

> Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not included in the monthly fee - they want to extract even more money from us! And I take issue with the actual pricing here too, for example Mulan was a whopping £20 - for comparison, an adult cinema ticket is around £10! So again, this feels totally unfair and unjustified.

That's not surprising. What if there's more than one person watching the stream?

> Disney is meant to be about "fun"

multiple decades ago, maybe

The problem was solved decades earlier: an FBI Warning at the start saying the screen can only be viewed by one member of a household at a time.

> That's not surprising. What if there's more than one person watching the stream?

So what if there is?

I'm watching at home, using my TV - it is nowhere close to a "cinema experience", I'm already paying a monthly fee, and I don't believe I've ever seen any streaming rental as expensive as £20 before. So, it was certainly a surprise to me!

> I'm watching at home, using my TV - it is nowhere close to a "cinema experience"

To replicate the cinema experience, for another €20 you could pay some kids to kick your seat and rustle chip packets, then turn the volume up to unbearable and play 35 mins of adverts before the movie.

Disney doesn't give a shit. Disney cares about the opportunity cost of other sales approaches.

It is surprising when the price ceiling for DVDs of recent highly-rated films in the supermarket is £10, and blu-ray is £15.

Yep, and you can watch the DVD or Blu-ray and sell it for a few pounds.

Traditionally, home video and cinema were two segregated markets. The reason why you paid 10 pounds for that DVD is because the film is a few months old. If you wanted to see it at release date you were paying the same price per person, per view.

> Furthermore, it seems like so much more content now is not included in the monthly fee

Disney literally haven't done any Premier Access titles in months now that cinemas have reopened.

Disney+ was always a service aimed at taking over the pay television market - and pay television was always roughly a year behind the theatrical release. They did a small run of (pretty cheap) extra paid releases while no cinemas were open, but that has now ended.

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