Posted by DeepLogin 1 day ago
I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.
Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not? Does anyone not? And if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?
* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.
* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.
* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.
* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.
* Email advertisements for Google products and services.
* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.
I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.
Howver recently I’ve noticed adverts for “membership” for channels, and that is getting me close to picking my youtube habit. Same with Spotify and advertising concerts, but that seems to have gone away for me after I complained.
Sadly even the bbc does adverts on iPlayer. You used to be able to instantly skip them, but then in a big (internal) fanfare some idiot decided they could make them not skippable and increase some metrics and then get a promotion.
I remember about 10-15 years ago YouTube actually did try to ban sponsor spots in videos, but the backlash from creators was strong enough that they walked that back to "ok well we'll allow sponsor spots but you can't just insert the sponsor's own ad, it's gotta be your ad read and B-roll".
That said, I don’t think YouTube owes it to Premium subscribers to add a sponsor block. That’s part of the video’s content as it was provided to YouTube, and YouTube never advertised YouTube Premium as something which will block in-video sponsor reads. This is part of how YouTubers make a living & a Premium sub doesn’t replace the money they receive for those the way it does for YouTube’s own ads.
Sponsorblock has zero issue jumping to the precise moment after the sponsor vs jump ahead always leaves just enough time to still hear the name of the sponsor.
That's their choice, and it's deliberate – it gives enough of a window for advertisers to get their message across, while still selling Premium users the notion that they've 'avoided' the ad.
Once you’ve transitioned from an ad-watching customer to a paid one, YouTube actually turns into something that treats your product experience and satisfaction as important.
It’s fascinating how it switches that off for non-paying users. Not a lot of companies’ services do that so obviously and blatantly.
In other words, when YouTube is being watched for free, they have that typical engagement incentive: keep you watching as long as possible, watch as many ads as possible, etc.
When you’re paying? Who cares, skip the content if you want. Use Gemini to summarize it, we don’t care if you watch the video.
If they don't want people watching videos without logging in, they should gate them behind a login screen rather than fucking with their users.
They are very logically making that difficult for you. They are exercising their right to refuse service to you.
I actually agree this is a bit annoying, but also the alternative is Google banning Youtubers from finding their own advertising partners, which I'm sure people would hate.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the practise, as long as that's clear up front. YouTube advertises Premium as an ad free experience, and in reality it's full of ads.
If they couldn't make money, 80% of the content worth watching would not be produced.
Premium works for me. Is it perfect, no. But there's that saying about perfect being the enemy of good.
YouTube could tell content creators not to include sponsorships. The terms are long and onerous. Of course content creators would be upset and they would make less money. Ultimately my issue is that YouTube advertises an ad free experience with Premium and it still has a LOT of ads.
YouTube isn't paying people properly, despite its vast revenues. At least with sponsorship the people themselves make some money.
Unpaid cooperation of human to generate knowledge or entertainment predates YouTube by tens of thousands years.
It is a basic right of people to be able to afford to live. It's easy to work for free when you have family money but you cannot support yourself when you don't.
That's completely fair. YouTube offers content creators many ways to do this. For example, they can put content behind a paywall. They can ask for donations. They can ask for memberships. Members get all kinds of fun perks. The part I have an issue with is YouTube advertising an ad free experience with Premium and then allowing content creators to fill their videos with ads.
> YouTube isn't paying people properly
I hope we can both agree that the solution to this is YouTube paying people properly, and not allowing content creators to shit all over viewers. That's pitting the little guys against each other while Google laughs all the way to the bank.
You don't get hourly pay for it, it's vaguely commission based and you do all your own promotion. They can demonetise you at a whim and refuse to pay you (I've seen this happen to craft channels and other content that wasn't remotely controversial.)
The solution is proper competition to google. Because Youtube is pretty much the one true monopoly out there. But as we all know, video hosting alone is very,very, very expensive. It really is something you need to be a billion dollar company to do, and Youtube wasn't profitable until like... 2 years ago?
So I tolerate the user ad reads as the best compromise because nothing else would work. I don't think Youtube is a model where Google is being greedy so much as practical. At least not in how it monetizes creators (there's plenty of hostile means they do to creators as is, but the monetary structure seems fine).
There is also a very limited range of content on Odyssee, Bitchute and all the rest. If you want to find music tutorials for example, you're unlikely to.
I think it's clear. I don't want YouTube going in and editing movies and creator videos removing any form of advertising. Maybe you want them deleting that content. But the average person realizes what Premium means by no ads. Being obtuse or willfully ignorant isn't reasonable.
And the real annoyance with YouTube Premium is that the UI is still full of engagement dark patterns.
Let’s freaking do it.
I worked on backend subscription management and the implementation of benefits. The team that business guy worked on was the group eventually at the center of the predatory subscription issue (I can’t say whether they were still around when that happened or not).
Some people can’t seem to live without YouTube though.
Get a Fire Axe. Put it in the TV. Enjoy life.
SmartTubeNext automatically updates itself, but the Apple TV and iPhone apps don't. Surprisingly, it has not been an issue. They keep working fine without updates for the year. I just update once a year when I refresh the certs.
That would make a great title for a write-up of your experience.
Are you suggesting that the burden should be on channel owners to upload variations of their videos that don't include sponsor blocks? That's a bit onerous. My commercial agreement is with YouTube, not with the video creator.
If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
YT Premium does provide the "skip ahead" functionality that almost always jumps over sponsor blocks.
I will say I've been a YT Premium subscriber for years and I've never seen any ads for other Google services in my feed, and I don't get advert emails either.
It is completely within Google's control. They have a hundred pages of terms of services, dictating everything the content creators may and may not do and say, down to individual words, symbols, and opinions. If Google wanted to, they could tell content creators to stop adding sponsorships. I understand you'd make less money.
> If you don't like ads from creators, don't watch those channels?
I stopped paying YouTube and I use SponsorBlock now. You're not entitled to my time or attention or money.
The problem is ultimately that Google advertises an ad free experience, which it's not. I'd be willing to pay for an ad free experience.
Ahhh but you're entitled to someone else's hard work in producing the content you watch, and god forbid they'd be entitled to compensation for that work.. Got it..
Rules for me, not for thee..
No, just mark the sponsored segments, so YouTube can skip over (like SponsorBlock does). And they already pay more per view from Premium users vs ad-supported ones, so it just makes sense to skip ads in the video as well.
That being said, I think paying creators directly is more sustainable in the long term.
To the end user they are indistinguishable from other video ads on the platform except the ad read is often (not always) done by the creator.
I don’t have hard data on the ratio but it’s not uncommon for a 10 minute video to have 1-2 minutes of full-interrupt ad segments embedded in the video.
And any ads underneath a video is at least not shown in the Roku YouTube player, nor are ad overlays as far as I know, since I've never seen one.
It could be that this is a phased approach so as not to anger their creators too much.
Worth noting is that there are thousands of high quality YouTube channels without any sponsored content. So those are effectively completely ad free with Premium.
It always gets more expensive for a lesser enshittified version, removed/fucked with features to keep a bloated product team employed
I’ve dismissed it every time. I don’t mind being shown that ad once. But it bothers me that they don’t care enough about my experience using their product to provide a “never show this again” option.
Or just use some metrics to know that if I dismiss it 50 times then maybe I’m not interested.
It's very easy to know for people inside the company who actually care about the product and for their clients. It is really hard for directors and VP that anything they understand are numbers.
If I say "hey this modal/pop up is making customers angry" they are going to ask how much they care (is there even an unit for that?) and how much revenue is lost. The only way for them to handle a project is creating a goal for next Q and assigning people, when in most cases what you need is actually the opposite.
The problem is not that no one knows how to fix it, the problem is that managers organize around big problems and become useless at improving the small things or details. They become blind. It happened to me 100 times. They do not want things to be fixed unless there's a clear revenue increase, which is stupid.
I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.
Apple Originals are always commercial-free.
You can't even find wired (aux) headphones... So tempering expectations when you finally decide to "go back" to simple things is required.
I like to buy my media rather than pirate (I am a man of means after all) but I can't even buy modern media.. Silo, Ted Lasso, Severance and Slow Horses do not have purchasable releases at all. At least some Prime TV shows have blu-ray releases I suppose.
I’ll always pay more to see fewer ads. My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up watching linear TV in the 90s and I’m going to keep it that way. If Disney+ gets in the way of that I’ll stop paying them and stop using their service, easy as that.
These media companies cannot help themselves. Advert money is very tantalizing and they'll always want to find ways to sneak it in whenever and wherever they can.
But now these are targeted ads based on browsing data for ad profiles linked to your IP and devices. IMO just a few of these are far worse than the general run of commercials we used to have on TV. Corporations obviously think so too otherwise we would still have that.
But there are a few crucial differences between then and now: The ad spots were there to keep the timetables accurate, which is no longer necessary. They also served as a way to let you know what else was on the channel, which again is no longer necessary because that app opens to a menu of all available programming. And, now this is the important part, back then I wasn't specifically paying for ad-free access.
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, my Jellyfin server is about to get much more use.
The answer could be nothing and I still respect the choice to speak with your wallet.
I think the iCloud password manager also works pretty well, provided you're using Apple products.
I don’t see adverts embedded in content as adverts. Be sure I’m watching the World Cup on bbc and see an advert on the players shirt doesn’t mean I want my money back, I’d rather we had no adverts, but it’s not unreasonable.
You are implying something false. That he’s suggesting thats not an ad. Hes not suggesting that at all.
What he’s suggesting is that that’s very different from Disney gating or interspersing movies with ads. Which it is. You may disagree with that but you’re strawmanning him.
And I didn't know what to say. Either I like the series and I'm going to buy the next season or I don't and I won't.
But ads in the middle of something I'm watching? Fuck right off with that.
People turned a blind eye to Apple advertising it's own services in it's products for years. I saw people defend here, on HN. So, while yes, it's advertising, Disney is far from the first to do this.
I'm not saying it's right, only that people who claim to be opposed to ads are accepting of the type of ads we are discussing.
> if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?
I'm assuming they aren't showing you ads for the plan you are on.
Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt?
[0] https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled...
In case folks aren't aware, Disney tried to avoid an allergy-related wrongful death lawsuit from a restaurant at Disney Springs (large publicly available outdoor mall that doesn't even require tickets) because a couple had a Disney+ streaming trial:
That's just how lawyers work. They'll try to invoke any defense that's vaguely applicable, just like any plaintiff lawyer will try to invoke any cause of action that's vaguely applicable, like the plaintiffs in this exact case.
The TOS argument was so awful it deserves some kind of bonus loss, but let's put that aside for now.
Let's say I paint a fence, and my neighbor complains I ruined a particular segment that shouldn't have been painted. Why can't I argue that this segment was on my property and that my neighbor gave permission to use that paint on all segments on their property?
Let's say there's a 15% chance the survey was wrong about the fence location, and a 15% chance the court disagrees with how I'm interpreting the agreement. If I can use both arguments I have a 2% chance of losing, which seems fair to me. Both arguments are reasonable, so why should I have to risk it on only one?
Stop infantilizing these people as if they have no other way to behave. It isn’t a law of nature that companies have to behave immorally. Hopefully you apply that understanding to your own job, too.
The new agreement allegedly introduces a third term “advertisements”.
> We’ve clarified that all Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content.
I say allegedly because I haven’t received any communication from Disney yet but various reporting refers to email people in European markets have received.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/disney-putti...
Ads embedded on the playing field? Sure. Billboards visible or sponsor logos on uniforms? I get it. Actual commercials? This is a solved issue for decades, there are "alternatives" as others have pointed out. This is a "Boiling frog" situation.
For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.
I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.
But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
I noted that the streaming service, like Paramount+, would be able to overlay their own ads over the broadcasted commercials, but they won't have control over the cameras. That's on the broadcast station, they're the ones controlling the remote production.
Paramount+ can only rebroadcast what my local CBS affiliate is broadcasting.
I think only Netflix and Prime have deals to actually produce sports broadcasts.
> But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.
I.e. instead of dead air, they could show some live feed in the spot that other broadcasters use for commercials.
What's happening in that time is just random bullshit. They'll run bits on the jumbotron, hold raffles, go play games with people in the stands, etc. All sponsored by "<SO AND SO>, the official <THING> of your <LOCAL SPORTS TEAM>". Or, in other words, ads.
You could show the players and coaches on the sidelines, but that's also rather boring. It'll be a couple of guys shooting the shit on a bench, or a couple of guys hunched over a table, or some guys warming up.
The best thing they can do is like information from other games maybe.
> What's happening in that time is just random bullshit.
Are most sports events like this? It sucks then, but the playing games with people in the stands thing sounds better than just plain ads. Mix that with sidelines shots, some alternative commentary maybe (with some instant replays?), and sure, information from other games, and you get a nice, coherent broadcast with some ads from the stadium but none that are as out of place as the usual commercial breaks.
I genuinely don't know and am asking out of curiosity.
To be honest if I'm paying for no ads I'd be expect to have an option to blur that crap on inpaint it with AI.
Monitors and TVs should have this option.
someone has to protect Disney from these unjust opinions!
fwiw... I believe Peacock is also allowed to run ads during live events, but at least during my motorcycle races they do not. a couple seasons ago they would go to a peacock banner and not show anything during the commercial breaks, but at some point they switched to just showing the raw video.
The full text for that section:
All Service Plans may include: (i) promotional content, (ii) sponsorships, and (iii) advertisements before/after playback of Content and in channels, live/as-live, special events, and any third-party services content.
Perhaps you could share, from the email, what you read that everyone else is missing.
But ideally, just stick to some non-video recommendation UI during the credits, and let me discover things on your platform by myself otherwise, and don’t get in my way when I’m trying to enjoy the show.
Call it what you want, if it's serving me content I didn't ask for, I'm not happy about it, especially if I'm paying extra for them to not do that explicit thing.
Sheesh ... they're a big company. This should be easy.
(More cynical take: the ads are the whole point, the content itself is just a vector to get those ads in front of people, and prime them to be receptive.)
1. Now you just have a blank screen. Sure some people might like that but others will think there's an issue with the stream.
2. They're purchasing the rights to show the sports stuff, not actually producing it themselves and removing the ads would make the cost of the rights astronomical.
Even when expensive linear TV packages were the norm, they still came with ads. With live TV paying has never negated the need for ads.
2. What? They own ESPN which is producing the content, right?
Baseball literally has an ad-free tier for its live streaming service. I’m sure it’s not the only live service that does.
None of your points seem well considered. Why run interference for these companies?
Unless MLB blurs/bleeps all of these, it's not really ad-free.
2. It probably depends on what sports we're talking about. Again, I'm thinking internationally where they've started showing La Liga this season.
NASCAR has a separate feed for international broadcasts without their ads. During the ad break they'll just show an overhead camera or maybe an in car camera.
Is that a GREAT alternative to seeing an ad? Nope. But in many peoples opions it sbetter than being force fed the same ads over and over when you paid for an ad free service.
And if you read the wiki in full you will see it also is talking about preroll content. I dont HATE the HBO pre roll ads for their own shows that play before I start an episode but it is still an ad. Its for content I might actually enjoy instead of for paper towels or insurance but it is still an ad. This is something that is entirely optional and that disney/hulu has decided doesnt count as an ad.
That's extremely broad. They won't show you ads, unless "other limitations require" them to? Would "our internal agreement between our streaming division and our content division requires ads" qualify? What would qualify as "promotional content" and in what sense is it "limited"?
This reads to me as "we can show ads anywhere we feel like it even if you paid us not to have ads." The only actual limitation will be their desire not to piss off paying subscribers.
I guarantee they will eventually use this to show more ads. The goldfish grows to fit its bowl.
I usually go for reputation and precedent rather then legalese. And in the case of Disney, they had ads in their video tapes and DVDs, so I don't need to read the user agreement to know that it has a good chance to come to Disney+, whatever the legal pathway is.
And it will be true because the only way to defeat these people is actually being an asshole.
Words matter. Words in advertising should matter. The slope is ice when we allow corporations to wordsmith around what they sell you.
I don't like when I press play and an advertisement starts for some other freshly released content on the same platform.
To me, my time has value, and my thoughts have more. A party whose goal is to interfere with both, and who actively schemes to interfere with the integrity of both is not merely greedy, they are a hostile actor.
This fight was lost at least a decade ago. Everything must now be a constant source of outrage
And ads for their own services are still ads.
If you pay to avoid ads, you are merely letting them know that you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff. You're doing their job for them by segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market.
At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to show up and notice how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those people full of disposable income.
The funny thing is the sooner you get off of some particular convenience treadmill the easier it is to stay off.
Endlessly scrolling some algorithmic feed hunting for something to watch can be done without getting off the couch, but it isn't actually fun. Walking to the library with my family to return a stack of books and movies and check out some new stuff is one of the highlights of our weekend.
For anyone who's wondering where to start, I'd like to suggest that your library probably has a copy of WALL-E.
My local library has access to Kanopy, Libby, and Blackstone. And as a Canadian, I've got CBC gem as well.
The available library of films, documentaries, books, and so forth is enormous. All bereft of ads, and mostly bereft of slop.
https://ninelives.karawynnlong.com/p/the-coming-enshittifica...
They always have to squeeze, crush, and destroy. Rob every customer, ruin every product, so they can enrich themselves.
And the difference from the current situation is?
And I can't understand why hackers never acknowledge this.
I can put gas in the tank of my car. In the future, they might lower the quality of the gas - or even make it more expensive! That doesn't change anything about the gas that I will currently put in my car.
> you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff
Advertisers already know that a hundred percent of the population have $20 in disposable monthly income, because they can pay with credit. So they don't learn anything new.
Every region where a streaming subscription costs $20 per month, 100% of the population has $20 in disposable income per month whether they actually have the money or not, because credit is offered for consumption.
Every region where a streaming subscription costs $5 per month, 100% of the population has $5 in disposable income per month for the same reason.
The original argument I responded to, is a typical hacker trope and of logical fallacy that gets repeated infinitely. It goes like this: "Just because somebody spent $10 or $20 on something which I would never want to buy, means they must be extremely rich and extremely wasteful with their money. So advertiser are drooling and crawling over each other to get their hands on this cash."
If that's the case, then advertisers clearly must also target tattooed people as the most valuable customer group possible, since every tattoo is proof that somebody once had 50 dollars.
The issue isn't your ability to cancel individual services. The issue is the increasing difficulty of living life as part of society without constantly having advertising shoved down our throats.
Lately I've been helping my mom downsize. She's got boxes and boxes of household goods that she held on to because it belonged to her mother or grandmother or great aunt or whoever. Basically just, when the time came to clean out the old house, dump the kitchen cabinets into a box, put the box in the basement, and leave it there for 40 years.
And the thing that's struck me is how much of this stuff is cheaply made and barely holds together. Sure, there's the occasional well-built item that resembles the stuff I'm used to seeing in antique stores. But mostly I'm just getting a lesson in how much survivorship bias informs my perception of 20th century consumer products.
If anything the real trend is the shift to plastic, which can be more durable but is also more prone to complete instead of partial failure and generally isn't repairable. e.g. a tin measuring cup might dent easily, but can also be bent back into shape. A plastic one probably won't suffer anything more than a scratch when you drop it, but when it finally does crack that's the end of it.
Speaking of plastic, so many people nostalgically remember Tupperware as a quality product that's much nicer than what you can get nowadays. But the truth is it was a multi-level marketing scam and their products were often contaminated with heavy metals. It used to be a lot easier to prop up a brand image in the pre-Internet days, when consumers largely couldn't talk to each other en masse like we do nowadays.
And before the FDA existed, companies were perfectly willing to put formaldehyde in milk, mercury in candy, and arsenic in vegetables.
Most food adulteration is a quality issue more than a safety problem.
Buy old peas but put a little green coloring in is almost the exact same thinking as let’s replace the metal gears with plastic ones to save a dollar per item. The vast majority of companies doing that didn’t kill or seriously injure anyone.
Companies have always been doing this.
They care about what boosts investor confidence.
So even if implementing a policy lowers operative income, if the growth in stock value offsets this, aka. number-go-up == true, the policy is implemented.
Consumers exist as a resource to consume. You hold the same mental position in their minds as the cheap plastic packaging they had to purchase.
The people making the movies and shows, writes, actors, production crew, all of those, probably do care, but in the management layers at Disney, Netflix, HBO, you name it, they don't seem care about the actual product. While the hell would you work at e.g. Disney, if you don't care about movies, cartoons and stories?
I'd stop paying them, but it always amazes me just how unbothered the average person is to watch 3 minutes of ads for 10 mins of content. Especially when it comes to platforms like YouTube.
I doubt I'm unique.
Abolish copyright and I guarantee they will completely change their attitude.
Did Shakespeare or Chaucer need copyright? What about da Vinci? And the cave painters of Lascaux?
Sure you may argue that copying had costs back then and doesn't today. Maybe that's the only difference but maybe it isn't. I think creativity and art are human compulsions. Not mere commercial endeavors.
All this to say: it would be a very different industry. But it wouldn't cease to exist.
One of the most interesting things about media consumerism is the extent to which people fail to realize that watching something else is always an option.
watching nothing and going outside or barefoot is the real alternative
What is that I see in the distance? A ship, right? They hail me, "Ahoy matey, come aboard, arrrrrrrrrrr...."
I'd rather see a healthy physical media culture again. Hard to enshitify that.
Here's a fix: bring copyright terms back to something sensible, say 15 years. After that point copyrighted material is free to use for non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes you still need a licence for another 10-15 years. Beyond that it becomes public domain, no licence required.
It's not unprecedented either. Basically every time in history that the common people got rights, it was a reaction to the common people ceasing to give the nobles what the nobles needed, forcing them to the bargaining table.
But there will still be demand for content, and people who are willing to pay for a non-enshittified experience. Piracy is essentially the consumer bargaining chip in an era of unprecedented centralization and monopoly power.
Totally false. The competition is in what shows people watch. The Pit not available on Netflix? Oh well, I’ll watch something else. There’s plenty of content. People are not subscribing to BritBox just to watch one show the heard was good.
E.g this survey: https://www.nexttv.com/news/a-hit-driven-biz-40-of-consumers...
"40% of Consumers Sign Up For an SVOD Service to Watch a Specific Show"
Or this Ipsos survey:
https://www.marketingcharts.com/digital/video-235725
[...]almost 4 in 10 (38%) agree that they often subscribe to a channel to watch a specific show[...]
It's on consumers to chose where to water, and consumers consistently chose the cheapest most immediately convenient shit. The Yin to "Corporations are all about profit" is the Yang of "Consumers are all about minimizing spend"
I can tell you with confidence that if you leave the consumer market and go to the commercial market (and especially the defense market), where they worship quality and reliability instead of "absolute cheapest option", the amount of enshitification and deceit drops dramatically, and you end up with some really solid (and expensive!) products. Consumers want an oven that costs $600. Restaurants pay $6,000 for theirs.
Why do I buy the cheapest oven possible? Because I have little defense against oven manufacturers doing the same thing Disney is doing with its higher-end subscriptions, and giving me expensive crap. I'm often happy to pay more for quality. But that's becoming more and more difficult as reputational signals get hacked. When I sort by price and buy the cheapest option, it's not because I prefer price to quality. It's because I have no way to judge or discover the quality of the more expensive options. For all I know, they're just as bad, or worse. So I choose the cheapest option because there's nothing else that distinguishes them.
In the 1990s, several CEOs, including Jack Welch, realized how exactly things work. Namely, most shares are held by retirement and pension plans who employ entire companies' worth of people to find a way to diversify and hedge, and the reporting period for their earnings is 90 days. You had major chunks of corporate capital held by people who couldn't really care less about anything other than the line going up, and any way to do so within three months was valid.
Once a company has achieved a certain market position, the long-term and non-financial aspects of holding shares (pride in the company, an interest in the market they competed in, etc.) are unimportant, and the customer's opinion stops mattering as much. You can assume that enough customers will stay around through sheer inertia no matter what you do, and that includes breaking up the company and selling it for scrap.
Since most shareholders aren't really attached to any one company's holdings, they plan for customers to leave when companies do anti-consumer things, and if a company is broken up, they just take the earnings per share on that break-up and plow it into something else that sounds like it'd be profitable.
You have to do business with people who are operating in a spot below that market position if you really want them to care about pleasing you as a customer.
For each service you feel that's enshittified, ask yourself how many real competitors they have.
Lately, it has been right down our list. I think my daughter still watches it on occasion, but nothing of note that I want to watch. If we didn't get it for free with our bank account, I'd cancel it. And with adverts, I'd be cancelling in a heartbeat.
Juggling subscriptions has become really expensive lately - but the only one I value is Netflix, but even then I don't feel I get great value from it, we seem to watch far less TV or films this year.
On the bright side the "new" app (which I assume is actually the same as used in the US) seems to not have the following annoying issues of the old one:
- It was impossible to enable auto play on a "kids" profile. As my kids can't use a remote yet I had their profile set to "adult".
- An episode would never be marked as "fully" watched, but this wasn't just a mild annoyance, it would "break" autoplay when re-watching a series because when it started auto playing a next episode which was previously watched, it would "continue" from where you had watched upto (minus about 30 seconds). This results in it cycling through the last 30 seconds of every episode of a show. The easiest way around this I found was to make a new profile every now and again for the kids.
It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.
The amount of ads I see in life compared to the 90s is still drastically reduced.
Remember that Disney owns the ABC TV broadcast network.
With this move, the regular TV news that has been streaming from abcnews.com and local affiliates for years has finally become inaccessible from all my Windows 11 PCs. This is using clean Windows with Edge only, no 3rd party apps or ad blockers, not relying on anything but good old Windows & Edge to handle security & privacy as well as they can.
Pre-recorded clips still play but not live news any more from ABC News or local station websites.
The same old PCs that played abcnews just fine until recently, and still play everything else at all resolutions.
The live internet streams were regular TV news with regular TV ads as always on their regular websites. No broadcast sports or entertainment programs were included, on the web those time slots were replaced by things like public interest programs from ABC studios. Including the same number of ads as the scheduled in-house news programs.
This hurts the advertisers more than anybody, Disney has now abruptly cut off countless web users who have always been just fine with the traditional 24/7 ads on the ad-supported news, apparently so Disney+ fans can be made more comfortable with any ads being eased in to paid premium programming. Just because they are on the same internet, that's a lot of collateral damage.
If I was an advertiser I would be hitting the ceiling and demanding far lower ad fees from Disney than there was a couple weeks ago. Now that casual random internet viewers have been kicked off the news stream in countless numbers.
The thing people fail to appreciate about media empires is there is no ad/not-ad distinction: it is all an ad, either for other products or for more of the same media.
A cursory search found that the first 3 subs I checked were the same cost or more than disney+ (HBO Max, Fox One, and Netflix)
Literally netflix, disney+, nytimes have become so annoying to use that I had to cancel.
Now they're one of the worst. Hard to watch anything on there.
When the alternatives are free and a better product (no ads and easier to use) it seems odd to expect people to pay for something less convenient.