This is the same terms of service that were stretched to indemnify against theme park accidents. [0]

Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt?

[0] https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled...

They already run ads for Disney parks, Hulu, ESPN, and other Disney owned content in the Premium tier. They just call them promos or sponsorships in the prior agreement.

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...

Why can't they remove the embedded ads with AI?

Sheesh ... they're a big company. This should be easy.

There are a few cases of ads that might not be practical to remove, though most of that would be more like sponsors and ad content that is a part of the show. You can certainly get live sports without ads, though you will of course still have the pauses in the game that allow the ads in the first place. But it's not unusual to see e.g. the halftime in soccer filled with analysis on public television that doesn't allow ads in that circumstance.

And ads for their own services are still ads.

In every large org, including disney, there are people who will fuck with you to the full extent of the terms and laws if they think it can increase profit... they do not care about quality, experience, or morals. I've fought these people about marketing emails at dozens of orgs as a consultant.

I guarantee they will eventually use this to show more ads. The goldfish grows to fit its bowl.

Boohoo the billion dollar giant can't do the same thing that regional sports have been doing for the last 20! years with the likes of NFL and Baseball.

Words matter. Words in advertising should matter. The slope is ice when we allow corporations to wordsmith around what they sell you.

Same, we had it for about a year, watched everything we wanted. Then after what they did to dilute the Star Wars franchise we dropped it.

I've worked for one of these companies as it rolled out a new app. Surprisingly, it didn't seem malicious. It was just platform/framework churn + "we need to unify all these apps into one common codebase"

It's like paying for cable back in the day but you also get ads. The sheer audacity they think they can get away with because they consider themselves having a monopoly.

The system discovered that it's always easier to force someone to give you money than to offer something they want to pay for.

I don’t know if that’s true. Look at the amount of lethal product defects over the last 100 years.

And before the FDA existed, companies were perfectly willing to put formaldehyde in milk, mercury in candy, and arsenic in vegetables.

Even with the lack of competition, shouldn't you have at least some pride on the product your offering? That's really what gets me every time, the fact that many companies actually don't really care about their product and clearly doesn't take any pride in it.

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 don't think it's that. Most people simply don't care.

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.

Companies increasingly no longer even care about income.

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.

Of course there is competition: "piracy". The thing streaming was supposed to (mostly) eliminate by being "legal", easy, not too expensive, ad-free and easy to use while offering a wealth of things to see and hear. It even worked, for a while, in some places. Then they limited what could be seen and heard because of corporate politicking. Then the price went up, just a bit. Then more movies and artists suddenly went dark. Prices were raised again. Terms of use were changed allowing "limited" advertising where there was none before. Prices went up again while disallowing that TV upstairs to partake without buying another subscription. More ads, fewer things to see and hear, price rises, rinse and repeat.

What is that I see in the distance? A ship, right? They hail me, "Ahoy matey, come aboard, arrrrrrrrrrr...."

> there is no real competition

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.