Did anyone actually read the linked wiki in full? It’s basically saying “if there are embedded ads in certain live (likely sports) content we carry you may see them even on an ad-free plan because we don’t have an alternative. Also we might try to promote different tiers of Disney+ itself within the app so to the extent you see that as an ad, that’s an exception to ‘ad-free’”
I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.
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.
Something I really dislike about modern consumer products is that companies simply don’t care if their decisions leave their customers embittered and feeling negatively about their decisions. It seems like that used to be a salient factor in how firms designed, sold and pitched their wares.
When we first got Disney + it was a winner in our house, then kids loved what they could watch, there was good family viewing too, and then was a few good shows that my wife and I were interested.
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.
In South Africa (and I imagine other countries) they're currently force migrating subscribers over to a "new" app (at least on iOS and tvOS) and your profiles with their respective watchlists is left behind in the old app, no way to migrate / import it into the new one. This isn't even mentioned on their FAQ for the process. A absolutely terrible user experience.
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.
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.
They increased yearly subscription just two months ago, from €139 to €159. Those €20 alone should pay for the ads. And Disney+ is already by far the most expensive subscription of all, while providing very limited content. This is completely out of touch.
Also all of the subscription services now have such draconian IP checks, that the false positives for password sharing have become super annoying. Every time I have to prove that I am me.
Literally netflix, disney+, nytimes have become so annoying to use that I had to cancel.
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.
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.
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.
That's sad. I do not want my money to go into ads anywhere. I decided
that for my own life, I can do well without propaganda, aka ads. I can
not kill ads in reallife, e. g. if a poster shows this on some house,
but I can most definitely get rid of it on the www, which I do. Ublock
origin is the bare minimum (I can also use it via thorium actually, so
via the adChrome code base, but I'd love to be able to de-google myself
as well - the sooner the better. Sadly I still depend on Google too much,
which does not make me happy. Now that Google ruined its search engine,
though, I am looking for viable alternatives. The other search engines
are really bad though, although I have increasingly noticed that I get
different search results, e. g. qwant shows other things than Google,
and in some cases better results using the same search query, which was
interesting. Sooner or later I can completely abandon the crap that is
modern google search).
I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free.
Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.
The changes are intended to cover the ads that are in pre-existing non-removable content. Nothing is changing, they're just making it clear that this is happening (or perhaps more unclear, judging by the response here).
Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions
(consumerrights.wiki)499 points by DeepLogin 21 September 2026 | 353 comments
Comments
I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+ supports a variety of content types - some of which naturally have ads.
A big example is the Super Bowl (coming in February), which has always had ads.
I don't bother paying for ad-free versions of any video service. At some point some analyst will say "but you could make $.000000000000001 more per share if you just put in a few ads" and that will be the end of it being truly ad-free.
Is it anti-consumer? Absolutely. Is finding ways to cut-in ads in a service marketed as "ad-free" arguably fraud? Yes. Does any of this matter so long as number go up and retirement funds keep raking in the money? No.
Have not missed it.
So, not new. Got it
The changes are intended to cover the ads that are in pre-existing non-removable content. Nothing is changing, they're just making it clear that this is happening (or perhaps more unclear, judging by the response here).