Disney+ Subscribers Face a Wave of Cancellations | Hacker News Reader

Disney+ Subscribers Face a Wave of Cancellations

techbook-magazine.com

33 pointslatexr36 comments

Surely it's not the subscribers facing the wave, but Disney as a company?

Indeed. It's not a high-quality publication.

It's deceitful for engagement.

It will to take a while for culture and society to adjust to the reality of corporate incentives. Selling out the cooperative principle for short term profits at the expense of trust is how corporate media works.

I think it’s deliberate: subscribers cancelling their subscriptions over Jimmy Kimmel and/or price increases is old news, but if you spin it as subscribers facing cancellation of (by implication) shows you can generate more engagement whilst credibly being able to claim it’s just a badly written headline.

This is a garbage website. Look at how the article reads like it’s unfinished, like half of it is missing and there’s no conclusion. Look at the absolute irrelevance of the articles and ads underneath the article.

It’s sort of unbelievable that it’s made it onto the front page here.

Yeah and some of the things I've seen getting nowwhere in new or showhn ... I know it's not quite random, but luck is such a big factor as to what makes it onto the front page of HN

Disable the vote buttons until the article link has been clicked?

I feel like people often vote topics not content.

That's what the flag button is for. You'll notice the article has been marked as flagged. I forget what the karma threshold is before it's unlocked though.

I always assumed flagging was for inappropriate off topic content, I never considered flagging lazy content.

By HN standards lazy is inappropriate. I don’t think it’s written quite that way but the intent is clear: high quality discussion of high quality content.

Yeah, given the first paragraphs, it's a poorly written article title.

Unrelated but I like to raise it when I see it. I used to love Disney+ because it was a fairly safe selection of content for children. Netflix pushes a lot of brain rot like cocomelon but Disney had the classics and other calm shows. Sadly I just see lots of blippi now and not only is he pure brain rot for kids, it’s hard to let my kids even think of watching know that he used to film shock videos like him being naked with another dude pooping all over him.

Edit: All/most of the streaming services make it impossible to opt in to shows. It’s either super clunky or they make decisions for you based on age. I find it’s easier to load up what I want in plex and use that as our digital shelf of DVDs.

Amazon will let you filter out individual shows but, yeah, it’s clunky.

Overall I do object to content providers pushing the responsibility for vetting content onto parents. Especially when one considers that, in the UK at least, broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV, are required to do this themselves for both broadcast and streaming, and for broadcast operate a 9pm watershed for content suitable only for adults[0], whereas streaming services charge higher and higher subscription fees and simply don’t bother. Rude.

[0] You can of course still choose to allow your kids access to this content but you effectively have to opt in rather than opting out.

Agree. Most of the ones I have tried have felt extremely clunky to the point it felt easier building a local collection via plex.

It’s an unfortunate after thought. I don’t want my kids to shun technology but I also don’t want them to be taken by an algorithm.

Hulu, ESPN, and Disney+ also sent out a notice that they’re increasing prices around the same time

I wonder how many cancellations are related to the price increase?

I know I switched to a cheaper bundle around that time, and it had nothing to do with politics. I just didn’t see the relative value of ESPN if I’m paying that much more for it

> I wonder how many cancellations are related to the price increase?

It’s very convenient that investors can’t tease out the causes of cancellation because of the timing of this. It almost makes one wonder if the increase was planned, but moved up deliberately to muddy the waters.

The problem isn't that people are cancelling - it's a drop in the bucket - but that investors are getting upset about it:

> The more than 1.7 million cancellations represent less than one percent of all Disney+ subscribers, but the timing is considered problematic. Just a few weeks earlier, Disney had promised its investors an additional 10 million subscriptions by the end of September 2025.

> Some investors are now demanding access to internal documents regarding Kimmel’s suspension to better understand the management’s decision. This puts the company under pressure once again to create transparency and more clearly disclose the development of Disney+ subscribers.

The country with the most D+ subscribers is India because they have exclusive streaming rights for cricket. If you subtract them from the equation that 1.7 million is even more troubling from a consumer backlash perspective.

The "problem" is that people are cancelling. That's why investors are getting upset.

This isn't just any metric. It impacts their bottom line.

Yes, the current impact is low, but the trend is going down when they expected it to go up.

Boycotts work. Voting with your dollars works. It's one of the few levers regular people have that can possibly make any impact.

> The problem isn't that people are cancelling […] but that investors are getting upset about it

”The problem isn’t that my PR is buggy, but that the reviewer is getting upset about it”

> Some investors are now demanding access to internal documents regarding Kimmel’s suspension to better understand the management’s decision.

“Politically motivated” is the reason. This must be obvious.

I cancelled my Disney+ subscription through App Store, but since payment is monthly and in advance I still have access for a few more days. So I wonder if my cancellation has even registered in these numbers yet.

I've never understood monthly subscriptions. It's not like it's technically difficult to implement prorating or even look back and see that I haven't used Disney Plus at all and refund me for non-usage.

This event probably triggered a lot of their inactive subscribers like me to look at their bills. Not only will it lose a lot of these people but the required marketing efforts to bring me back would cost a lot more now too.

Nothing that involves time and/or money is easy to implement. Not (only) because the code would be hard to write, but because what is at stake. Also, letting money flow back to the customer can lead easily to money laundering/legal problems. So, maybe it is not "technically difficult", but it sure costs more money to make it possible, than other things.

While it will give a little more revenue, I suspect keeping users longer in a "self-paid trial" might ended up change their mind and keep the subscription.

The only reason I would subscribe would be an interesting movie/tv show that I cannot find anywhere else. Frankly, these days if I find those, they just go onto my backlog... then there are also my games, books, bucket list things to do backlogs. So, I'm not subscribed to anything.

Has nothing to do with ease of implementation. Has everything to do with the bottom line. Not refunding the remaining half of the month, not refunding the previous unused three months - this keeps money in the corporate bank.

When we cancelled, I found it interesting that there was no place for a comment. My back-of-the-napkin theory, in-line with this post, is that they don't want the data to be available for these shareholders with questions.

Corporate fuckery all around.

When I cancelled my Disney+ subscription in Finland, the web form asked for a reason, and there was an "Other" option that accepted a freeform explanation of why I'm cancelling.

Maybe they don't want feedback in all countries...

I read these complaints so was surprised to have a different experience.

We’re based in the UK and cancelled via the website because there was no option for us to cancel via the Apple TV app (probably signed up on my laptop originally, I’d guess), and there was a comment field so I did not hold back in informing them exactly why I was cancelling.

So I wonder if the availability of the comment field varies by country or sign-up method - not that there’s any really good reason it should do.

I canceled at that time and had the same experience. I was only able to select from 4 or 5 canned reasons for cancelation.

Presumably those are the 5 reasons they think shareholders will want to hear.

I'm about to be one of them if it incorrectly accuses me of not being in my primary household one more time. The anti-sharing crackdown is driving me crazy (we don't share!)

What are the actual tangible gains they make from this beyond just limiting the use of a Disney+ account to <=n screens and/or locations at the same time (where n can be 1 for all I care)? See also: netflix.

Some of us actually travel for a living.

If they were clever they'd pivot to allow sharing as a means of differentiating. It's a wager on how desperate they think they are. Not being desperate, being complacent, is what kills giants. Only the paranoid survive. I wonder how Andy would think Intel is doing today.

It should be surprising to no one that censorship is very offensive to Americans. Subscription services, which are already an annoyance, should beware.

Even the Roman Empire knew not to mess with either the bread or the circuses.

Seems like Disney is just private equity at this point churning out slop while wearing Walts skin.

Machine translation of a German publication based on an old Engadget story based on a Bluesky

Hacker News is the best quality.

> 436% above baseline subscriber churn

5 times the normal cancellations is no movement. A lot of that will people pulling the plug early so Disney will regain that share.

It never made sense, FCC was threatening Disney, they had a gun on them.

Unlike Rosanne or ABC cancelling Bill Maher (Who Jimmy Kimmel replaced), they canceled them because they were weak.

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