Price Hikes, Enshittification Trigger 700K Customer Losses At Disney+, ESPN+
from the what-could-go-wrong 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 (like equating password sharing with “piracy”) — all while simultaneously cutting corners on product quality in a bid to give Wall Street that sweet, impossible, unlimited quarterly growth it demands.
Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (all now owned by the same company thanks to consolidation) all recently raised prices to access streaming catalogs of deteriorating quality. Some of Disney’s price hikes were as much as 25 percent, hitting ad-based and ad-free versions alike. Customers were quick to complain.
So not surprisingly, Disney+ has now seen the first quarterly subscriber loss in the streaming platform’s history, with 700,000 customers cancelling service. ESPN+, ESPN’s streaming service, also saw a 700,000 subscriber loss:
“Total paid Disney+ subscriptions currently rest at 124.6 million compared with 125.3 million at the end of the fiscal fourth quarter. ESPN+ also saw a loss of 700,000 subscribers, currently at 24.9 million, compared with 25.6 million at the end of last quarter.”
Publicly-traded companies can’t just provide a quality, affordable service people like. That’s simply not allowed.
They have to provide Wall Street ever-escalating quarterly returns in the pursuit of scale, even if that pursuit proves disastrous. If it’s not possible to achieve those returns through innovation and subscriber growth (which is no longer possible now that the streaming market is saturated), that’s when big companies get in trouble and start creatively nickel-and-diming their user base.
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.
Which is to say don’t expect things to change, even if the economy tightens and customers increasingly balk at higher streaming video prices.
I’d expect two major trends in streaming over the next few years. One, a significant uptick in pointless, shitty mergers that trigger layoffs, huge debt loads, more price hikes to recoup that debt, and steady product quality erosion (see: the whole AT&T→Time Warner→Discovery mess). Media execs are very excited for the Trump administration to rubber stamp even more problematic consolidation.
Two, I suspect companies will work tirelessly to make cancelling streaming services (a major advantage over traditional bloated cable TV) more difficult, whether that means complicated wireless/broadband bundling that makes dumping services a confusing hassle (is your Hulu subscription discount tied to your Amazon or wireless bill?), or some creative new restrictions we haven’t seen previously.
Filed Under: disney plus, enshittification, espn plus, price hikes, streaming, television, tv, video
Companies: disney
Comments on “Price Hikes, Enshittification Trigger 700K Customer Losses At Disney+, ESPN+”
In terms of entshittification, Disney has made it even worse: the ad-free subscription tier is no longer a guarantee of avoiding ads.
If I didn’t know any better, I would say they’re actively trying to get people to pirate their content.
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TBF, Disney’s only following Amazon in enshittification.
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I dunno about that. Changing the terms and conditions just so people can’t sue for false advertising is more shitty to me.
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It sounds bad, and I haven’t reviewed the specific agreements, but many web site agreements require users to hold them harmless and even indemnify them. In other words, if you sued them, you’d be paying their legal bills and any amount the court awarded you.
In theory. It’s such an absurd result that it’s hard to believe a court would uphold it; I’m not sure any company’s even tried. My point is, “you can’t sue for false advertising” is actually a much better clause than the usual “you can’t sue for anything ever”.
(I found such a clause in the terms of the payment provider my landlord wanted me to sign up with—a company that wanted access to pull money directly from my bank account while offloading all responsibility for their errors onto me. Needless to say, I complained, and I’m using checks again like it’s the 1980s.)
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Oh, no worries, Disney covered that as well.
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People really need to start treating this shit as they’d treat actual contracts. If Disney handed guests a binder of legalese to sign before being let into the park, well, the lawyers would be happy, because their kids would be walking right onto otherwise-deserted rides. But the company would probably have to backtrack pretty quickly, just as Walmart would if they made everyone sign the printed walmart.com agreement and its ancillary policies before entering a store.
Somehow, if it’s online, people will be eager to agree to literally almost anything.
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I find that people sign paper contracts in person that are also onerous and stupid because society has forced them to turn off their brains and has forced them to blow exorbitant amounts of cash they don’t have on things they wouldn’t need if they wern’t structured to force these needs. Then there are also those who sign just cuz they want stuff, which is also frequently a social disease.
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Read again (if you have the necessary comprehension): AC never said that Disney and Amazon are doing the exact same things, only that Amazon went down the enshittification path first. This is the same as AC saying that Amazon had a streaming service before Disney, and you reading that as AC claiming they both stream the exact same content.
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So, should it be called “endisneyfication”?
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That was already a thing, but you can roll all the stupid Disney behaviors up in that coinage.
No, but they sure do try.
They almost got me with the last one until I read the fine print.
A Game of Numbers
So Disney+ lost 700k customers. On a total of over 150 million subscribers, that’s less than half a percent. I imagine their departure was more than made up for with the price hike for the remaining customers.
I guess the beancounters are striving for a balance between raising prices fast enough to appease the stock market and slow enough so less customers bail.
Anyway, they’re not in this business for the entertainment value or the service to their customers.
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Hard to say. Even if they’re making the money back from increasing fees, it doesn’t look good to the shareholders that they lost almost 1.5 million subscribers across two platforms.
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Especially for the ad-based products. If raising prices results in fewer subscriptions but the total profit is up, I can’t see investors having an issue with that. But if raising prices is impacting ad impressions… THAT has a cascade effect.
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It’s shocking they have that many subscribers given how Usanians keep complaining they can’t even afford food.
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I… didn’t know that Disney+ streams only in the USA. Who knew?
Subscribe through a burner credit card.
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That’s a better answer than simply no longer paying their monthly bills. But I must confess, how does one obtain a ‘burner’ card… without being totally dishonest about one’s identity in the first place? Credit issuers have their own rules about these kinds of things, let alone the laws regarding fraud, etc.
My version of a ‘burner’ is where my debit and credit cards are issued by a credit union. At my union, I have the power to designate a black list of companies no longer permitted to lay charges against my card/account. Wherein I am honest and don’t wait for the service provider to cut me off, I simply stop using the service entirely, on my own. My premise is that if they turn me into collections, they’ll have to provide documentation that I never tried to cancel through their ‘official’ channel(s), and that I did indeed use the service and then failed to pay for it. I’ve told more than one collection outfit to get me those proofs, beyond just a simple billing statement, and for sure, it’s never happened. It’s worked so far.
N.B. Note that states may have different laws regarding the necessary proof. What I described is what my state requires, your state may be different. I do know that collectors will try to skate around these laws and brute-force you into paying, but hold your ground. Or at the very least, get educated on what your state allows (or requires) a collector to do.
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I use virtual credit cards. If they won’t let me unsubscribe then I can just cancel the card.
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It works because the amounts are too small to take you to court, or for a debt collector to put in much effort. But, technically, you’d be on the hook for fees till you canceled, and we don’t know whether a court would accept a “it was too hard to cancel” defense.
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Only if they continued to provide you the service during all of that time. While that works for the archetypical impossible to cancel gym membership, that’s because those who wish to stop paying also wish to stop going to the gym. If Disney was actually giving everyone who stopped paying “free” access to Disney+, it would not go well for them.
It’s getting very visible in my bubble. Piracy is flourishing again.
Of course these companies will point to piracy as the cause of their losses, no the consequence as it actually is. And they’ll extract huge figures incompatible with their actual self-imposed losses and generally taken from their collective arses.
could boycotts also be affecting subs?
Note for Karl
700k subscribers lost against 125 million overall, with 24 million on ESPN+ alone, means total subscribers went down 3%, which isn’t nothing. It is directly tied to the price increase from $9.99 to $15.
It does feel like the current strategy of all major businesses is to kill themselves, from Reddit and Twitter locking their APIs to Netflix and Disney+ increasing their prices for no good reason. Tesla went from being the cool electric car company to the car people are embarrassed to drive and have to slap bumper stickers on saying they bought it before Elon became a fascist president unelect. Most of Teslas revenue last year was from licensing [https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-crypto-tesla-earnings-stock-elon-musk-trump-accounting-ev-2025-1?op=1](and selling cryptocurrencies), it seems.
All that being said, you forgot to call anyone brunchlords, Karl, so this article is bad and you are a monster. I made this account to leave this comment. Thumbs down, unsubscribbled. Disgusting. #dobetterkarl
Re: That Darn Joe Buck...
Rough back-of-the-envelope est is ESPN/ABC is locked into ~$4B/yr in sportsball contracts. To make it worse, NBA ratings are down 5% this year. So losing even 700K subscribers is going to leave a mark
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It may feel like it, but is it happening? Are they dying? Certainly Disney isn’t. Video entertainment is an oligopoly, and the copyright monopolists can abuse their position to withhold stuff from any companies who’d want to undercut them. People still refer to permissionless downloading as “piracy” and illegal (which it’s not in most countries), and have a general feeling of “wrongness.”
I think it’s too soon to tell with Tesla. It could end up like Enron, but for now its stock price and sales remain high. “Fascist president unelect” might be a selling point for Trump voters who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in electric cars.
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I’m not sure that’s true. Piracy is a copyright violation almost everywhere.
Unless you mean de facto legal, then yeah.
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Uploading copyrighted stuff without permission is usually illegal (though rarely criminal at non-commercial scale). Downloading is usually not, and in fact is sometimes explicitly legal due to copyright levies.
To be fair, it’s not that they don’t learn. Capitalism dictates that revenue must go up. If they weren’t using the main leverage they have to make the line go up, they’d be replaced. Short of changing the rules of capitalism, there’s no other end than enshittification for such large enterprises.
Mine was supposed to go up in March to $159 for the year; this after being $99 in 2023.
I’m like “Nope!”
So my cancellation will show up in next quarter’s earnings report.