Ads are money laundering.

Are we going to buy insurance after seeing the same ad multiple times per day every day? No.

Ask yourself who's paying for ads, who gets paid for ads, who owns both those companies or conglomerates, and how whoever controls the ads controls the content.

And I literally cannot log in to cancel my subscription. Caught in some redirect loop.

HBO, on their “ad-free” tier shows ads for their own content before almost everything. I reached out to support about this and they said they don’t count those as ads.

These companies are all scum. They shift definitions and make the service worse. I won’t be renewing my subscription to HBO over this (I’m upset I bought a whole year), and I won’t be opting for Disney+ in the future either, as it sounds like they are doing similar things (and more).

To me, “no ads” means “no ads”. I’m done with these technical definitions people come up with in board rooms to subvert customer expectations and erode product quality.

Really, people don't pay for 'ad free' .. rather, they do, but what they really want is 'interruption free', which I think is why Disney+ promoting their own content as part a stream is essentially perceived as an 'ad'. I personally think it should be considerd an ad regardless of it being your own content or not. I don't care if it's someone else's , or your content, it's an advert for that content.

The linked wiki focuses on a new user agreement from January 2025. A link to the referenced article might have been more appropriate:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Disney-New-user-agreement-allow...

As far as I can tell, this new user agreement only applies to Germany, at least for now.

PSA: Soon german brand AVM will have dns blocking of advertising right in their routers (fritz box). Search the web for Fritz!OS 8.40 if you are interested.

Working in video ads has validated that I basically never pay for video or music services. 90% of dev time is spent optimizing the monetization path while the playback path needs to be good enough.

Anecdotally, appleTV never remembers which episode I was watching or the timestamp in the episode. I'm def not paying for the opportunity to yell at my TV.

That said, IMO this is the only business model for streaming companies and content owners to see bucketloads of money, so it sticks. Also, free tier makes for easy entry.

But I would gladly pay $10/month for a seamless streaming experience (app and playback) where I just select a couple of titles at a time. Similar to the mail version of netflix, but without snail mail.

At this point, streaming a known catalog is a text-book system, albeit expensive in terms of distro and bandwidth.

The point of capitalism is to accumulate resources and to indefinitely seek growth in a finite world. It means making things cheaper to produce (e.g. via dematerialization, automation, cheap labor through immigration or globalization, mass production, intensive agriculture, self check out, cheaper ingredients for recipes, lowering standards, etc.) and generating higher revenues (e.g. via subscription services, ads, selling your data, shrinkflation, reducing everything to the lowest common denominator to appeal to the masses rather than the niche, etc.).

Even more than being the point of the game they cannot survive without it due to higher stakes and competition.

A comorbidity ridden cancer we might hope to find a cure for someday.

Disney, after having completely failed to appeal to the next generation, needs to extract as much revenue as they can now