I strongly agree, and it frustrates me when people and companies claim that advertising their own products "doesn't count." I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads. These are all the ads they permit on Premium, despite advertising everywhere that Premium removes all ads:

* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.

* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.

* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.

* Email advertisements for Google products and services.

* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.

I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.

I’ve been a paying customer of Dropbox’s consumer plan for over a decade. Each time I visit their website I am greeted with a full page modal ad asking me to upgrade to a different plan I have no use for.

I’ve dismissed it every time. I don’t mind being shown that ad once. But it bothers me that they don’t care enough about my experience using their product to provide a “never show this again” option.

Or just use some metrics to know that if I dismiss it 50 times then maybe I’m not interested.

I get super bent out of shape when Apple TV+ advertises shows before the one I am trying to watch; even sometimes advertising the show that I am trying to watch itself and spoiling things.

I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.

I grew up with the Disney channel on cable as a kid in the 90s. Disney channel at that time was ad-free except for cross-promotions for other Disney channel shows, most of which I (as a kid who liked the Disney channel) wanted to know more about. I have HBO Now/max/go/whatever and before most shows there’s a skippable promo for HBO stuff. So yeah, I don’t think this is new and Disney+ as it is now is way more ad-free than either of those, so I’m not surprised they are trying to nudge the status quo back to a historical equilibrium; it’s just what these companies do

I’ll always pay more to see fewer ads. My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up watching linear TV in the 90s and I’m going to keep it that way. If Disney+ gets in the way of that I’ll stop paying them and stop using their service, easy as that.

I agree. I noticed recently an ad directly inside of 1Password. I’ve paid for a 1Password subscription since 2013, and have had a family plan for many years. I know the company changed hands several years back after AgileBits sold to VC, but this type of disrespect caused me to cancel my membership. There are plenty of alternatives that haven’t turned their focus to the “Enterprise” and aren’t trying to extract as much money as possible from their paying customers.

The BBC in the UK makes a great play of having "no ads" but 6Music (their indie music station) has constant cross-promotions interrupting the music, sometimes for jarring TV murder shows. Cross-promotion is just as annoying as ads for insurance, I hate it!

Yeah, those kinds of ads are always aggravating to me because you’re not even making money by showing them to me. They feel like a display of power more than anything else.

Yes I see those, and adverts for other services (watch this program etc) as adverts.

I don’t see adverts embedded in content as adverts. Be sure I’m watching the World Cup on bbc and see an advert on the players shirt doesn’t mean I want my money back, I’d rather we had no adverts, but it’s not unreasonable.

> Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not?

You are implying something false. That he’s suggesting thats not an ad. Hes not suggesting that at all.

What he’s suggesting is that that’s very different from Disney gating or interspersing movies with ads. Which it is. You may disagree with that but you’re strawmanning him.

If I use service X I am MUCH less annoyed by an advertisement of subservice X.Y than I am by an advertisement of Nord VPN and Raid Shadow Legends.

One of the most egregious examples of this that's happened to me was with the DVD set of the second or third season of Mad Men. One of the unskippable pre-menu ads was for the next season.

And I didn't know what to say. Either I like the series and I'm going to buy the next season or I don't and I won't.

I may be an outlier but I don't really mind being shown a relatively short ad before watching something. I'm almost never really paying attention yet anyways. Like yes, I'd prefer it not to exist but it doesn't cause me to get into a fit of rage.

But ads in the middle of something I'm watching? Fuck right off with that.

It is an upsell. It is a sales tactic. Sales isn't the same thing as advertising even though they both are trying to get you to buy something.

> Does anyone not?

People turned a blind eye to Apple advertising it's own services in it's products for years. I saw people defend here, on HN. So, while yes, it's advertising, Disney is far from the first to do this.

I'm not saying it's right, only that people who claim to be opposed to ads are accepting of the type of ads we are discussing.

> if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?

I'm assuming they aren't showing you ads for the plan you are on.

An add, but no more than catching a glimps of a restaurant long after one has ordered. When standing in a shop it is normal to see prices for other products on offer.

Your link doesn't appear to work for me.

In case folks aren't aware, Disney tried to avoid an allergy-related wrongful death lawsuit from a restaurant at Disney Springs (large publicly available outdoor mall that doesn't even require tickets) because a couple had a Disney+ streaming trial:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

I feel like they stopped doing that, but there was definitively ads for other movies and shows because some movies on Disney+, but I haven't seen it in a while. It was pretty badly done, because you'd get confused and assume you'd started the wrong movie, so maybe they rolled it back?

The quoted text is identical to what I have received in an email from Disney+. I only tend to get a month at a time when I want to watch a given show, but if paying doesn't remove adverts, I'm not going to pay.

No, there's nothing really to do. They aren't producing the feed, they're essentially hosting a stream from another broadcaster.

For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.

I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.

But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.

> Ads embedded on the playing field? Sure. Billboards visible or sponsor logos on uniforms?

To be honest if I'm paying for no ads I'd be expect to have an option to blur that crap on inpaint it with AI.

Monitors and TVs should have this option.

I read it more as a contract issue rather than a technical issue

They mailed me too, and I did read it in full. There's a link right there in the e-mail. I read it, and understood it's not at all what everyone here is claiming.

Even that is a bit too much to my taste. For self-promotion pre-roll kind of ads, if I can skip it the first time I see it, and I don’t see it ever again, and I don’t see more than one ad like this per day per series, then I’m reluctantly okay with that.

But ideally, just stick to some non-video recommendation UI during the credits, and let me discover things on your platform by myself otherwise, and don’t get in my way when I’m trying to enjoy the show.

They could. They won't, because those ads are probably - if you excuse a little Claudish - the load-bearing part of the contract that allows them to show the content in the first place.

(More cynical take: the ads are the whole point, the content itself is just a vector to get those ads in front of people, and prime them to be receptive.)

If you're talking about sports stuff:

1. Now you just have a blank screen. Sure some people might like that but others will think there's an issue with the stream.

2. They're purchasing the rights to show the sports stuff, not actually producing it themselves and removing the ads would make the cost of the rights astronomical.

Even when expensive linear TV packages were the norm, they still came with ads. With live TV paying has never negated the need for ads.

That's why I don't really care that much about terms and conditions. Just because they say they can doesn't mean that they will, conversely, the writing can be misleading to anyone who isn't a specialized lawyer, so most people can't really tell what the terms and condition let them do anyways.

I usually go for reputation and precedent rather then legalese. And in the case of Disney, they had ads in their video tapes and DVDs, so I don't need to read the user agreement to know that it has a good chance to come to Disney+, whatever the legal pathway is.

They don't stop at terms and laws. They stop at what loses money, through customer churn or lawsuits.

Typically the only restraining force is a founder who cares.

It's worse than that. Advertising is a vector for dumping who-knows-what into our minds. Would you let random corporate sponsors put whatever they wanted into your food after you'd already put in the work to choose what you're eating?

To me, my time has value, and my thoughts have more. A party whose goal is to interfere with both, and who actively schemes to interfere with the integrity of both is not merely greedy, they are a hostile actor.

Whereas you would never stoop to exaggeration or your own contribution to this fight since it’s already lost, right?

In most of these cases, you will see a place like D+ carry the same announcers as the TV station. Here Inbet it would be ESPN crews. So having a different, special crew just for ad breaks would not be exactly great. And given the density of ads in, say, the Super Bowl, you would be hard pressed making this a good experience.

Every year it gets more and more important to learn how to not be sucked in by a small amount of convenience. "Capitalism" has figured out how to abuse your desire for maximum convenience. You need to figure out what your price is for it, and stick to it like glue.

The funny thing is the sooner you get off of some particular convenience treadmill the easier it is to stay off.

I highly recommend asking if your library has access to Kanopy. It's a video streaming service for libraries, and works on a monthly token system.

My local library has access to Kanopy, Libby, and Blackstone. And as a Canadian, I've got CBC gem as well.

The available library of films, documentaries, books, and so forth is enormous. All bereft of ads, and mostly bereft of slop.

Why DVD and not Blu-Ray?

I love libraries but DVD are pretty ancient in terms of video quality

> which means the thing you like probably gets deleted anyway when it's deemed unprofitable

And the difference from the current situation is?

I've made this argument here on Hacker News dozens of times over many years now.

to what do you attribute the increase you've noticed?

I am morbidly curious of your definition of 'the population', could you elaborate?

The gas analogy is a good one, because those fuckheads also shove advertising in your face when you're already giving them money for a product.

The issue isn't your ability to cancel individual services. The issue is the increasing difficulty of living life as part of society without constantly having advertising shoved down our throats.

I also question the extent to which this is true.

Lately I've been helping my mom downsize. She's got boxes and boxes of household goods that she held on to because it belonged to her mother or grandmother or great aunt or whoever. Basically just, when the time came to clean out the old house, dump the kitchen cabinets into a box, put the box in the basement, and leave it there for 40 years.

And the thing that's struck me is how much of this stuff is cheaply made and barely holds together. Sure, there's the occasional well-built item that resembles the stuff I'm used to seeing in antique stores. But mostly I'm just getting a lesson in how much survivorship bias informs my perception of 20th century consumer products.

If anything the real trend is the shift to plastic, which can be more durable but is also more prone to complete instead of partial failure and generally isn't repairable. e.g. a tin measuring cup might dent easily, but can also be bent back into shape. A plastic one probably won't suffer anything more than a scratch when you drop it, but when it finally does crack that's the end of it.

Speaking of plastic, so many people nostalgically remember Tupperware as a quality product that's much nicer than what you can get nowadays. But the truth is it was a multi-level marketing scam and their products were often contaminated with heavy metals. It used to be a lot easier to prop up a brand image in the pre-Internet days, when consumers largely couldn't talk to each other en masse like we do nowadays.

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.

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.

I’ve worked in a finance department — and this is a very idealistic view of how such decisions get made.

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?

There's always competition for the consumer dollar, unless you are the only business selling necessities for survival such as electricity, gas, food, and such.

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.

Without copyright, almost none of the content would get produced, especially in this digital age of zero-cost copying, and “they” (the companies) wouldn’t exist.

Copyrights are such constrained monopolies, though. More or less on the same level as how Nike has a monopoly on Air Jordans, but not on shoes in general.

One of the most interesting things about media consumerism is the extent to which people fail to realize that watching something else is always an option.

Copyright is the cancer of the human culture. Always has been.

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.

That doesn't really make sense here. This whole issue is about the more expensive options. "Consumers are all about minimizing spend" right, and that's why they have a cheap option with ads. That's fine. I don't approve of advertising, especially in paid products, but they tell you exactly what they're selling. But they also have a more expensive option with "no ads." And guess what, that's a lie!

Why do I buy the cheapest oven possible? Because I have little defense against oven manufacturers doing the same thing Disney is doing with its higher-end subscriptions, and giving me expensive crap. I'm often happy to pay more for quality. But that's becoming more and more difficult as reputational signals get hacked. When I sort by price and buy the cheapest option, it's not because I prefer price to quality. It's because I have no way to judge or discover the quality of the more expensive options. For all I know, they're just as bad, or worse. So I choose the cheapest option because there's nothing else that distinguishes them.

long time Netflix user, my experience using Netflix with ads is the opposite. I find watching anything on Netflix unbearable due to frequent ads. I’m about to pull the plug

Didn't cable have ads too?

The amount of ads I see in life compared to the 90s is still drastically reduced.

They have a government granted temporary monopoly.

Not exactly, it's more like paying ten different cable companies at the same time.

Except you can cancel it from the next month with a few clicks.

Back when I had cable it was all like 15 minutes of content blocks separated by 30-minute blocks of ad. Because fuck me, I guess.

I don't really mind their unification efforts making me have to install a new app which for me on its own is only a minor annoyance and absolutely not worth getting at all upset about.

It's that they made no effort to bring over profiles and their associated watchlists, "continue watching" is my most used section of all the streaming apps (which they love moving every time I relaunch the app, but that's a different topic) and they didn't even apologize for essentially throwing away years' worth of tracking what the last episode I watched was.

This comes across to me as judgmental (and you don’t know the situation of my kids and their screen time), my view is to each their own, it’s an option you can turn on/off as per your own preference.

Where I live HBO Max is 5,99 to Disney's 15,99 a month.

In my experience, I'm usually revising TV shows and movies that I enjoy.

Say I want to rewatch the office or snatch. I just don't have the patience for the dongle to wake up and refresh all the banner ads, then the app to load, then get ads.

I should appreciate how far technology has come that a tiny computer is running off 10W to connect to the internet to watch and listen to anything I can imagine. But in that moment, I just want it to work as smoothly as turning on a dvd player.

These days I feel like I get much better value paying for cable with hundreds of channels than I do any streaming service.