Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ All Jack Up Prices As Streaming Enshittification Continues
from the bleed-them-dry dept
Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we’ve noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV.
That has involved chasing pointless “growth of growth’s sake” megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited, quarterly growth it demands.
After Max just imposed a new round of streaming service price hikes, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (all owned by the same company) have all followed suit, imposing higher prices to access streaming catalogs of deteriorating quality as companies try to claw back at debt loads. Some of Disney’s price hikes are as much as 25 percent, and the hikes are hitting ad-based and ad-free versions alike.
User opinions on Reddit and other online forums haven’t been kind:
“The enshittification of media in the last few years is insane and it’s wild how seemingly no one cares anymore about making something that is actually enjoyable to watch and not their egotistic[al] pipe dream.”
The price hikes come not because Disney is desperate; Disney this week reported its first ever modest streaming profit ($47 million on revenue of $6.5 billion).
The business press of course treated the discovery that you make more money when you charge more as an act of uncanny business savvy; not mentioned is the fact that these kinds of price hikes simply aren’t sustainable, or the fact that the costs for a “growth for growth’s sake” mindset are always borne by the consumer or the employee.
Publicly-traded companies can’t just provide a quality, affordable service people like. They have to provide Wall Street ever-escalating quarterly returns. If it’s not possible to achieve those returns through innovation and subscriber growth (which is no longer possible now that the market is saturated), that’s when big companies get in trouble and start creatively nickel-and-diming their userbase.
Traditional cable TV, of course, went through this exact life cycle. And despite the fact many of those executives have shifted over to streaming, they’ve learned nothing from history or experience because they’re not financially incentivized to learn from experience. They’re incentivized to make stock values climb at any cost, then flee when things get rough; fat executive or investor compensation in hand.
Price hikes, annoying restrictions, or crackdowns on the villainy of (previously encouraged) password sharing won’t be enough. You’ve also got to cut back on customer service, push cheaper, lower-quality content, and ultimately embrace utterly pointless mergers that trigger waves of layoffs.
This cycle for streaming won’t end until they’re disrupted in turn by better alternatives, even if those alternatives wind up being a resurgent interest in film and TV piracy. At which point, to be sure, any remaining executives that haven’t fled or retired are guaranteed to blame everything and everyone but themselves.
Filed Under: cable, disney plus, enshittification, espn, growth for growth's sake, hulu, piracy, streaming, tv, video
Companies: disney
Comments on “Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ All Jack Up Prices As Streaming Enshittification Continues”
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If that’s the game, I can beat them. Here’ my new streaming service:
And we’ll call it… the Aristocrats +
Re:
yeah but you are not lying about all that….
Yo ho ho, it's a pirate's life for me
Between pirate streaming and torrents, it’s a much better experience. (And anything I download, I keep forever: 8T external drives are affordable and will hold many, MANY hours of video content.)
I expect others to follow the same path. The entire streaming experience is getting to be as awful as the entire cable experience: always more money, always less value.
Sometimes I have to wait to see things; sometimes (e.g. sports) I can’t get them at all. But I would rather wait or do without than pay these idiots.
Disney+ originally had a monthly fee of $7. Disney lost money on it every month, but in the short term they were willing to eat the loss because it drove customer growth.
Disney+ subscriptions stopped growing in 2022, at which point “we’re using cheap subscriptions to get new subscribers” stopped being a good business strategy.
Disney+ turned a profit for the first time ever Q2 of this year.
TLDR: “Growth for growth’s sake” is WHY THE SERVICE USED TO BE CHEAP, not why it is expensive now.
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“Disney lost money on it every month”
I have heard of hollywood accounting, is there such a thing as Disney accounting?
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Isn’t it amazing how TV was free, completely ad supported, for its first 40 or so years?
I just cancelled my Starz subscription the other day because they emailed me to say the prices were going up in September. Starz!
Even the Jim Belushi of streaming services knows they can get away with this price-hike racket.
Meanwhile, seedboxes have gotten cheaper and cheaper.
I wonder why their business model of Dewey, Cheatum and Howe doesn’t work very well. I guess we’ll never know.
ironic
Yet the streaming services are so bare of anything worth watching, I’m starting to realize that churning one a time isn’t going to work. I’ll have to start building in times when I subscribe to nothing, just to give them more time to make anything worth watching.
Netflix has been a one-month-per-year subscription but now I wonder if I should give them 18 months. The rest are trending that way too. I can switch to Hoopla & Kanopy during the down times. I never get thru my quotas anyway.
Huh. AI spam, perhaps?
Maybe Techdirt web page should have non-printed text like…
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It would be fun if that worked more often.
Does it work on texts?
It would be great if adults could stop complaining about prices in a (pretty much) free market. The top streaming platform is YouTube, which is free. Or you can choose to pay for no ads. If other streaming platforms charge more and more, it’s shockingly because everyone involved wants to make money. Platforms and creators alike. Everyone can cancel one or more. But if you take content like live sports beyond the NFL, the streaming services offer far more than cable or broadcast ever did.
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Do you think YouTube allows full episodes of House Of The Dragon and other popular shows which are directly tethered to studios which own streaming services? How utterly braindead are you?
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“It would be great if adults could stop complaining ”
Why would that be great, and for whom would it be great?
“(pretty much) free market”
Not free as in beer, not free as in freedom, wtf are you going on about?
“shockingly because everyone involved wants to make money”
I doubt anyone is shocked about the need to earn a living, perhaps your sharp wit can solve the entertainment industry problems with a quick retort.
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It would, sure, but everyone complains about prices. Not just the “middle-class” who I imagine this sort of critique just constantly refers to. The people at the bottom of the corporate ladder complain about rising costs of living. You might, of course, default to the argument that entertainment is a luxury, not a right. To which I’d agree, in which case you quibbling that the poor cannot afford your streaming fees is meaningless, because you were never going to get their non-existent money.
But perhaps the most egregious complainants about costs in a free market are the publishers, the platforms, the asset owners, the executives. They whine about how much it costs to hire someone. They whine about how much it costs to license something. They cut costs and corners wherever they can to appease shareholders who do nothing besides pray at the altar of passive income.
Yeah, who would’ve thought? Because shockingly, people tighten their belts in a market of shrinking opportunities for employment and career progression. It’s not my responsibility to enjoy paying more for a crappier service. It’s not my responsibility to write a chest-thumping paragraph in defense of consumer-unfriendly practices.
Streamers go and charge to remove ads they put up while they neglect their buggy mess.
Wall Street related
paste:
provide Wall Street ever-escalating quarterly returns.
Can somebody explain to me why W.S.’s opinion matters!?
Explain it to me like I’m 5 years old. (you may need to use words of 1 sylable and crayons)
yah, I know...
O.K., for all you pendants out there.
SYLLABLE.
OK?!
huh, whaddya know.
pedant
Olympics nuf said
So insted of being paid Pennies per Channel from cable companies.
They ask $10 per month, for 1-? channels, which is MORE then the cable corp ever.
Then decide they can charge more?
The real understanding here, is how much they were earning WITH YOUR INFO, and With adverts. While doing Less paperwork with the cable corps.
What's a pirate's favorite letter?
Most people think it it’s the Rrrrrr, but no… it’s the C they love.
A lot of people gave up pirating when streaming became so easy, fast, and legal. Folks like me saw what was coming and never left the boat.
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I may have left the boat, but I neatly folded and stored my black flag in case I need to one day fly it again.
“Publicly-traded companies can’t just provide a quality, affordable service people like.”
As a science experiment, someone needs to try locking Karl Bode in a room with Tucker Carlson to see if concentrated ignorance collapses to form a black hole.
And over here in Australia it now appears that the shrivelled formaldehyde soaked creature named Rupert is looking at trying to unload Farce…I mean Foxtel. It’s been bleeding customers for years.
The answer is Money.
No crayon needed.