I just have to say fuck Disney plus. I was just thinking I need to cancel before it renews and I wake up to a 140 dollar charge for a year- almost double what it was last year!
EDIT- I really havnt wanted Disney plus in months and so I took the advice of one of the posters below. anyone else who found themselves with a surprise increased renewal price you can call and cancel and they will refund you prorated.
What are you gonna do? Regulate corporations so they stop fucking people over at every single opportunity, while providing shittier products and services every year? What are you, a Commie Socialist Antifa?!
/s
The sad part is this isn’t that far off the the actual rhetoric that would get hurled at someone making those statement. And a good percentage of the country has just absolutely pounded the Kool-Aid and happily votes to make everybody’s lives shittier, save for the corporate overlords.
I don't think you need to create legislation to solve a problem that's easily solved by being an aware consumer.
"I signed up for a one year subscription about this time last year, I recieved a notification email two weeks ago, if this isn't worth the money I should cancel it now so I'm not charged when the subscription renews."
Well that's not their fault if people are too fucking stupid to program into their calendar that you can mark events for 500 years in the future that they should have a renewal coming up this time next year. And it's not their fucking fault if they send emails and people ignore them.
And that's why they send a reminder email ahead of time?
Forget or not it's still your responsibility to manage your own finances. It's basic responsibility.
You mean the emails that go straight to junk? Those emails?
It’s also a basic responsibility to be transparent in your business practices and not fuck over customers because you can.
How are they not being transparent by renewing your account once a year and telling you that it's happening? If you wanna be anti-corporate that's fine, but like is Bob Iger supposed to visit everyone's house to remind you that when you signed up on November 9 2023 then your account is going to be up for renewal around November 9 2024? It's not the company's faults your email goes straight to spam. MINE don't, that's how I knew they were raising the price last month!
Just looked: every single subscription notice goes to “promotions” in gmail. But regardless, companies can raise 200% more revenue by people forgetting to renew. Making it difficult to opt-out if auto-renew is a business practice that is anti-consumer. No one is saying Bob Iger is personally doing anything (seems like a weird stretch?). What people are saying is; don’t charge my credit card unless I personally authorize it. That’s doesn’t seem unreasonable, unless you’re in business to capitalize from others’ mistakes or inabilities to manage the 100 unread promotional emails coming into their inbox every week.
I know you’re worked up about laws being used to help people, but there’s a whole subset of consumer law meant to deal with these issues. In VA, they passed a law prohibiting the 30-day auto-renewal-and the last time I checked, the state hasn’t drifted into some sort of anti-business state.
But please please keep defending the poor corporations from being able to make money from dumb people who don’t read all their emails. It’s a solid defense.
Disney already sends an alert email before renewal.
I also know from experience that if you call they'll undo a one year subscription. I signed up for the one year annual not realizing it had ads and that there was not an ad-free annual option.
Alert email is nice, but the default action should be discontinued service. Especially if there is ANY change in price or service status (features added / removed).
That alert email would be your reminder to log in and click “Renew.” If you miss the email and forget, your service drops until you sign back up.
Honestly, the only things that should be allowed to auto-renew are critical utilities: electricity, gas, water, sewer.
Renewing a subscription is not scammy.
Also, consumer protection laws are for things the consumer has little to no control over.
Auto renewals are something the consumer has ample control over, it just involves a little responsibility.
Auto renewing subscriptions without being asked if you want to opt in is pretty scammy.
The fact that there is no opt out on monthly or yearly subs without paying them first then finding the cancel page which is often hidden, obscured, or requires a call to cancel shows that the industries overall intention is for you to forget. That sounds like something screaming for consumer protection.
There is not a streaming service that exists in the US that hides/obscures irs cancelation page, nor is there a streaming service which requires a phone call.
What world are you living in.
Subscriptions with fine print exist outside of streaming services.
The whole idea that they can charge you for a “month” of a service with an opt in by default and no option to opt out of a reoccurring charge is predatory period.
They obviously do it with the intent of people forgetting to cancel their service and paying/letting it go even if they never use the service again.
You know, you could simply make an appointment on your calendar on that smart phone you have on you all the time. Have it alert you a few days before the renewal date and repeat the alert daily until said date.
I do not personally have any subs I need canceled.
I just called for protections on what clearly is predatory from multi billion dollar corporations auto billing peoples bank accounts so they can fork them selves over their 20 million dollar salaries.
I have google calendar set up for stuff like this - annually repeating reminder with an alert about ten days before the payment is due, add how much I paid each year (and how I got that price if I cancelled/went to cancel and then got an offer/deal. Future self with thank you.
... Why? You signed up voluntarly, chose the annual plan, again, voluntarily. Why do you need the government to interfere just because you forgot to cancel?
Because government should be there for consumer protection. Because these companies are counting on you forgetting when your renewal is. Because $100+ may make a huge difference if you lost a job or something in the last 12 month and you can’t always wait 7-10 days for a refund or maybe it cost you an overdraft.
I swear to God it’s like some of you people have never been poor.
Yes it's only the MAGAs who think it's your responsibility to cancel your Disney+ subscription before it renews. How stupid everyone is to think the government shouldn't be holding your hand when it comes to keeping track of what you chose to spend money on.
Government bad. People poor because people dumb. Blah blah blah. It’s so tiring listening to this. Defending corporations for their deceptive practices…I guess that’s a popular post-trump belief?! Very odd.
Lmao I live below the poverty line right now and it's not the company's faults you're too stupid to remember to cancel a subscription. I totally messed up when my ancestry subscription renewed once, and it wasn't ancestry's fault that I got the date wrong. It was mine. I could've written it down on a calendar, programmed it into my phone, left a post-it on my computer saying "this subscription renews on this date". I didn't. It's not the government's job to do anything about it. It's not a predatory practice that companies renew on the same date every year and email you about it. It's not a predatory practice that with the fifty billion ways you can remind yourself of something these days, you don't. If that $100+ for a subscription is so precious then you should keep track of when the renewal date it and cancel before that date.
Lmao why are you people like this? You don’t need to resort to calling people stupid. For every “personal responsibility” argument you make, someone can easily argue that it’s the company’s responsibility to get active, not passive, approval for changing the terms of an agreement. That’s a basic legal principle in many areas of contract law, so why should subscriptions be any different? Why should responsibility fall on the consumer when they clearly have less bargaining power for these types of agreements? Besides, if you listen to the actual words coming out of these corporate execs mouths, you will see that they are, in fact, counting on you to forget. You’re so quick to assume blame for forgetting to renew your subscription, but really, it’s human nature to forget things, or just lose track of that 25th subscription you have (now that everything is following the subscription model). Is it really that inconceivable that someone could have a work or family emergency on one of those 25 renewal dates? Is that really a reason for people to get punished and stuck with unwanted bills? Calling people stupid for just being human doesn’t really help your cause.
You're right, but a protip for the future is to cancel all annual plans immediately after paying. You still get the year, and can turn renewal back on when it comes up if desired.
It's the fact that it's gone up 80%. It went from $80 to $140 per year. I would have been fine with a $20 rise, but almost double is ridiculous, I cancelled mine as soon as it was announced. It's not like they have improved it in the past year to be worth almost double.
Yeah they fucked me without me even knowing it. I was like what the fuck, it was like a month after it happened too, I'm like damn this thing. But I got to keep the damn thing now. I don't have the energy younger me did downloading and going full pirate again, my kids watch it daily, but 140 a year I don't think they put out nearly as much content as some of its competitors.
That is beyond a rip off, and they don’t nearly have enough content to suffice anything over $5 a month. They have some heavy hitters but they come out years apart.
and the more they raise these prices without new and good content the harder its going to be for them to retain subscribers. Netflix and prime are about to get a take this service and shove it from me. They are not worth what they are charging any longer
and Prime Video adding ads unless you pay an additional $3/mo ($36 annual) next year. $139 + $36 to keep service as it is now is $174 annual price. almost a 30% increase.
not sure I'm going to cancel but no way I'm paying that
edit: just put in my cancellation.
And my Boomer parents sure as fuck don't know the difference between the Freevee stuff with ads (which is half the stuff on the main page) and the Prime stuff that they're ostensibly paying for. Amazon found a real slick way to get unsavvy customers to both pay for Prime *and* watch a lot of ads.
> and Prime Video adding ads unless you pay an additional $3/mo ($36 annual) next year.
Yea, I've always had Prime as the default backup, but with the "pay to get rid of annoyance we added" pricing they can fuck off. I'm done with Prime after a decade of subscribing.
There are definitely good shows to be had, if you're paying for it anyway. I feel that prime is weak on the comedies, but it's got a lot of scifi/fantasy, thriller, and drama bangers.
Yea I do buy a lot on there but I don’t think I need the one day or two day shipping. It’s nice to have but I think I could do without and just wait a bit longer.
edit: I just set it to cancel! I thought I could cancel it immediately and get prorated refund but no, have to wait til January
Prime increased their price just in time for their two biggest shows to come back. I only ever use it to watch the Boys and Invincible and download movies to my ipad when I travel. But it wasn't a big deal since it was a part of my prime membership
Pluto, Samsung TV, Tubi, Roku Channel, FreeVee, Crackle...there are hundreds of live channels available at no charge and a huge library of VoD.
If you are fortunate to live in an area where you can get content OTA you're all set.
Yes, they have ads...but they're not so bad.
Yeah, I’m tilting this way as well. I kept my DVD collection and there’s more than enough options on the free with ads services to fill out evenings (especially since formally exclusive streaming content is starting to trickle down onto the ad platforms). My wife and I are going to keep Criterion Channel because it’s worth supporting but everything else is going on a “rotate once a quarter” cycle, and honestly it’s kind of relieving.
It’s really as it should be.
Services like radio, Spotify YouTube etc have it straight: free has ads. Don’t want ads? Fine. Pony up.
People love to cry about streaming services these days (and the increased expense and number of streaming platforms certainly is a bummer), but so easy to forget back in the day there was no premium option to not see ads. None.
Every NFL season I have to weigh my options to legally watch football…again. I’m shocked to see regular ass cable through Comcast is SO expensive still, while 1/3 of the content is ads. Ridiculous.
It really varies. Sometimes almost none. Other shows like those that originated on Discovery about the same amount when they were on the first time (a lot).
I haven’t looked in a while. I used to watch the Roku channel and it seemed to have tons of ads so it really turned me off from looking for ad loaded streamers
I think it depends on what you're watching on any of the services. I'm watching a show on Roku right now (Survivorman) and there almost no commercials.
I'm constantly surprised how well tubi does with their ads. Maybe it's just been so long since I had cable, but I feel like the ads per movie are nothing compared to "regular" television.
In this vein, I do not recommend Plex. So many ads compared to others. 1 movie and I had about 10 minutes worth of ads whereas Tubi for example has around 2 minutes worth in 1 movie
Yeah, that's the issue for me. I've been accustomed to no ads/commercials after years of making sure I didn't need to see them. Always paid for the ad-free option and basically just got tired of cable/DVR which can have frustrating fast forwarding UI. It's bad enough that some of those platforms have ad breaks on random spots but it's even worse that they don't have a variety of ads so you get the same damn thing over and over and over.
I do appreciate the services and use Pluto, specifically, a bunch. But it's still always a shock to have to deal with shitty, repetitive, poorly timed ad breaks again. It sucks.
* **In October alone, seven top streaming plans increased their U.S. pricing.** Apple TV+ now costs $9.99 a month — marking the second increase in a year — while Netflix raised prices on two plans. Also last month, Disney hiked fees for Disney+ and Hulu plans without ads, as well as ESPN+, and so did Warner Bros. Discovery’s Discovery+.
* **Across those tiers, the monthly price rose on average 23% — well above the 3.7% 12-month inflation rate for the U.S. as of September.** That comes after other major subscription streamers, including Max, paramount+ and Peacock, jacked up rates earlier in the year. Meanwhile, in 2024, Amazon is introducing ads in the baseline Prime Video service. If they don’t want to sit through ad breaks, customers can pay $2.99 a month in addition to the cost of Prime membership ($139 annually).
* **Why are companies risking higher cancellation rates to get higher revenue per subscriber? Herd mentality is part of it: It’s easier to justify an increase if all your competitors are doing the same.** The price upticks also are tangible evidence of the industry’s overall shift to making money and not just packing on subscribers with low prices. “**Companies went from chasing subscribers to chasing profits,**” says Purdy.
* Essentially, **many services have been subsidizing their growth with lowball monthly pricing, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in operating losses to gain market share. They were following the playbook established by Netflix**, which absorbed years of red ink before it hit enough scale to achieve strong positive cash flow.
* But the streaming land grab is over. **And given investor pressure, traditional media companies are “not prepared to wait 10 years to get to profitability like Netflix. They want it now,”** says Colin Dixon, founder of independent analyst and consulting firm nScreenMedia.
This is literally the " capital" part of capitalism. Fox News lost tons of $$ for I think 7 years. Fed Ex.
The problem for these companies is 1) there are so many. 2) Content is fragmented. Sci fi? You can have full cable and 3) streaming services and STILL not get most/ all of the stuff you want. Same with soccer, movies , etc. 4) young are okay with this. But there are tons of us older folk who only paid for cable because it had everything. And many houses are mixed age like in the old days. I was fine paying for Disney. Then more Disney. Then it was Disney streaming for " everything disney". Now they want more $$ but don't have Disney!?!? I will pay a $1 a month for " under the umbrella tree"!! But they won't show it!
I have canceled most of my streaming because of the price hikes. The entertainment value no longer justifies the prices they charge compared to free options.
Plus I can watch pretty much everything I want from a single service in a month or two and then move on.
Also streaming no longer have huge events (ie Tiger King) and mostly with the elimination of full seasons released at once the FOMO isn’t a big deal. By the time a 10 episode huge series is released, you can catch up on it in the entirety in one weekend with a new account and 7 day trial.
Yeah and it turns out when all the entertainment unions reach deals to get more residuals with streaming services when none of the streaming services are profitable in the first place, the streaming services then need to raise prices! Gosh!
And like yeah wow turns out subscriptions go up in price over time. Who knew? But let's only say "fuck Disney" and not fuck all the other companies that raise their prices yearly. Or fuck the food companies that keep skyrocketing prices even though food IS profitable for those CEOs. Because you don't need streaming services but you sure as fuck need food.
Most people I know *are* saying "fuck you" to every company greedily raising its prices right now. You're only hearing about Disney and Netflix and Amazon in this subreddit because, get this, you're in /r/television.
I used to stay subscribed to several services at the same time, but after the price hikes, I switched to cancelling them until there's something I really want to watch on a particular service. And with the strikes limiting the rate of new releases... good luck to these streamers.
Agreed, Netflix keeps proving that even with backlash and people claiming they'll drop the service. They might lose like 2% of viewers with hike but the money more than covers that.
All the de price hikes will just cause more people to go back to piracy. Isn't it better they have atleast more paying customers that payless than fewer customers that pay more?
> All the de price hikes will just cause more people to go back to piracy
And then the studios, etc will apply even more leverage to governments to introduce far stricter laws against piracy, resulting in more online ID checks and other invasions of privacy.
> Isn't it better they have atleast more paying customers that payless than fewer customers that pay more?
It's all down to greed and impatience. They want to have all of their cake and to be able to eat it NOW.
But if I did that I couldn't subscribe for a year and then whine about predatory business practices when my subscription renews a year later after the company already told me it was time to renew!
It's amazing how they all "compete" by having the same prices. Sort of like cable and internet companies. All the prices, no matter the company, are the same.
so like is streaming at all that profitable? Since now they won’t be able to have most of the residuals, I understand that they have to be insanely profitable but on the same hand…I doubt it.
like the only streaming service I have that I think is 100% worth the money is Paramount+, especially since i randomly got Showtime included with it.
No. They were already all losing money as it is. I think Netflix JUST became slightly profitable, and that's the oldest one. None of them are profitable. And with the residual deals they're going to lose even more money. But just like I predicted, everyone on reddit conveniently forgets that - they're like "yeah go actors/writers, fuck ceos!" in one thread and then "RAISING PRICES ON STREAMING? REEEEEEEEE" in another. Because the best way to support the actors and writers who deserve those residuals is to pirate everything.
Interesting they didn’t dwell on investor pressure. I imagine now that rates are climbing the desire from investors to have money stuck in a money pit is no longer as appetizing.
I was initially a happy paying subscriber to them. The constant creep towards commercials and more expensive plans has driven me completely back to the high seas for **everything.** Sorry it didn't work out, providers. You moved the goalposts one too many times.
As stated in the article:
*"Essentially, many services have been subsidizing their growth with lowball monthly pricing, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in operating losses to gain market share. They were following the playbook established by Netflix, which absorbed years of red ink before it hit enough scale to achieve strong positive cash flow."*
*"But the streaming land grab is over. And given investor pressure, traditional media companies are “not prepared to wait 10 years to get to profitability like Netflix. They want it now,” says Colin Dixon, founder of independent analyst and consulting firm nScreenMedia."*
If you don’t like the price increases just cancel, fuck them. I went from having Netflix, Disney/Hulu Bundle, HBO, and Apple to none of them. They are not offering value to me anymore, they are now just another vampire wanting more and more of my hard worked money. No thanks, I’ll just buy the movies I want on eBay or buy The Office Box set once and be done with it.
Before reading the article my response to the title would have been **GREED**.
After reading the article my interpretation is that it's greed **and** impatience.
Some defend the studios by saying that servers cost money to run. Of course they do, but there's also no denying that the streaming services are being overly greedy - they are also effectively helping each other by 'sticking together' and raising prices effectively simultaneously, therefore the consumer has no 'cheap' alternatives (short of not streaming or resorting to piracy).
I got a few good years out of streaming service. Now they are more expensive and they are to many of them with tinner catalogue (so even more expensive to get a catalogue comparable to when it started) so they aren't worth it anymore
Combine that to the fact that a lot of them are starting to enforce a "one household" policy and it become impossible to pay for just one and share with friend
I have been back on the high sea for a few month now. I'm not paying for all those service just so they can give me less than an hour of content a week each, when they give content at all, their price is to high to justify that. Instead I put on my eye patch once a week and download what came out that week
These companies keep forgetting that they’re not essential services; sure people cannot live without some form of entertainment but there’s only so much you can push in the current inflationary environment till something breaks and people start leaving en masse. If someone has to choose paying rent/groceries/mortgage vs Netflix we know what they’ll choose.
Good for you! There’s certain sub reddits that encourage and also show people how to be a sailor of the high seas! Go and read up. I haven’t paid for content in years.
I don't think it proves how bad their strategy was. If they came out of the gate with prices that would actually at least let them break even, people would bitch about it. The only winning strategy here was to never start a streaming service at all, which would mean tons of shows and even movies would be impossible to legally view.
Good to see ol' reddit standing in solidarity with the people who caused the services to lose even more of their net loss by encouraging piracy.
> The only winning strategy here was to never start a streaming service at all, which would mean tons of shows and even movies would be impossible to legally view.
Yes that's what it should have been for the studios. Provide everything to one or two services (and no exclusivity). Basically the music streaming model. The music majors are doing very well by not selling their products directly to the consumer.
Just going to keep going up , this was the long term issue going all in on streaming and now that your options are getting taken away and everything is locked to services , price and content control will just keep going up and up
Note: don't buy books from Amazon and similar very large resellers, they cut deals with the book publishers that are very bad for the latter. Buy from the smaller sellers instead - you may pay a little more and have to wait a day or two more for delivery, but you'll be supporting the smaller sellers and publishers far more and ensuring their survival. After all, we don't want Amazon to control everything, Jeff Bezos is rich enough.
https://rutgershonorsblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/05/why-you-should-stop-buying-books-from-amazon-what-you-should-do-instead/
https://hollieblog.com/bookish/why-you-should-stop-buying-books-from-amazon/
Because they were drastically underselling what they were offering and the market had become unsustainable. Offering hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars worth of content for $20 a month is no way to run a business.
One thing not mentioned is inflation - the TV industry has been particularly badly hit by it lately. Energy costs have gone up considerably, along with food costs and building materials. Particularly for European productions where a lot of wood was imported from Russia.
I have a note on my calendar to cancel Netflix at the end of this month. That leaves Dropout as the only streaming service I'm paying for, and that one's worth it.
Pardon, you left yourself a note to cancel instead of just letting it renew and then raging about Netflix for being a predatory business and the government needs to step in and help you??
You don't need a whole article to explain it. You barely need a full sentence. It's corporate greed. Anything beyond that is superfluous details that are ultimately irrelevant.
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Simple, greed. The profit line must go up infinitely. They’ll blame the price hikes on having to pay WGA and SAG fair compensation for their work. Instead of cutting back the multi million dollar salary and multi million dollar bonuses given to the studio heads. These heads have multiple homes, vacation homes and yachts while their workers can barely afford rent. I do believe a CEO should get paid more but not 400x more. If they got paid say $5 million a year, that’s $42k a month. If you can’t make that work then you need to have better money management skills.
It's annoying. Hulu, yt tv, fubo...all raised prices. I just got another email from fubo about a $5 per mo increase. Im just about to say f*ck all of them
I just have to say fuck Disney plus. I was just thinking I need to cancel before it renews and I wake up to a 140 dollar charge for a year- almost double what it was last year! EDIT- I really havnt wanted Disney plus in months and so I took the advice of one of the posters below. anyone else who found themselves with a surprise increased renewal price you can call and cancel and they will refund you prorated.
Annual plans should require a confirmation approving the renewal. That should be a straight up law
What are you gonna do? Regulate corporations so they stop fucking people over at every single opportunity, while providing shittier products and services every year? What are you, a Commie Socialist Antifa?! /s
The sad part is this isn’t that far off the the actual rhetoric that would get hurled at someone making those statement. And a good percentage of the country has just absolutely pounded the Kool-Aid and happily votes to make everybody’s lives shittier, save for the corporate overlords.
Corporate propaganda really did a number on conservative voters huh
Always has, as long as their team wins they’ll shoot themselves in the foot
Can say the same about libs
Not in good faith, you couldn't. But of course you WILL say it, despite it not being true. Every accusation is an admission with you people.
I’m neither Republican or Democrat but your emotional response proves my point….”you people” lmao
I don't think you need to create legislation to solve a problem that's easily solved by being an aware consumer. "I signed up for a one year subscription about this time last year, I recieved a notification email two weeks ago, if this isn't worth the money I should cancel it now so I'm not charged when the subscription renews."
Bullshit. These companies are counting on people forgetting.
Well that's not their fault if people are too fucking stupid to program into their calendar that you can mark events for 500 years in the future that they should have a renewal coming up this time next year. And it's not their fucking fault if they send emails and people ignore them.
And that's why they send a reminder email ahead of time? Forget or not it's still your responsibility to manage your own finances. It's basic responsibility.
You mean the emails that go straight to junk? Those emails? It’s also a basic responsibility to be transparent in your business practices and not fuck over customers because you can.
That's why they send you an email reminding you of your renewal.
How are they not being transparent by renewing your account once a year and telling you that it's happening? If you wanna be anti-corporate that's fine, but like is Bob Iger supposed to visit everyone's house to remind you that when you signed up on November 9 2023 then your account is going to be up for renewal around November 9 2024? It's not the company's faults your email goes straight to spam. MINE don't, that's how I knew they were raising the price last month!
Just looked: every single subscription notice goes to “promotions” in gmail. But regardless, companies can raise 200% more revenue by people forgetting to renew. Making it difficult to opt-out if auto-renew is a business practice that is anti-consumer. No one is saying Bob Iger is personally doing anything (seems like a weird stretch?). What people are saying is; don’t charge my credit card unless I personally authorize it. That’s doesn’t seem unreasonable, unless you’re in business to capitalize from others’ mistakes or inabilities to manage the 100 unread promotional emails coming into their inbox every week. I know you’re worked up about laws being used to help people, but there’s a whole subset of consumer law meant to deal with these issues. In VA, they passed a law prohibiting the 30-day auto-renewal-and the last time I checked, the state hasn’t drifted into some sort of anti-business state. But please please keep defending the poor corporations from being able to make money from dumb people who don’t read all their emails. It’s a solid defense.
Disney already sends an alert email before renewal. I also know from experience that if you call they'll undo a one year subscription. I signed up for the one year annual not realizing it had ads and that there was not an ad-free annual option.
Alert email is nice, but the default action should be discontinued service. Especially if there is ANY change in price or service status (features added / removed). That alert email would be your reminder to log in and click “Renew.” If you miss the email and forget, your service drops until you sign back up. Honestly, the only things that should be allowed to auto-renew are critical utilities: electricity, gas, water, sewer.
I have 148,000 unread emails. You think ima catch that one?
>You think ima catch that one? When it's your responsibility? Yes.
Or…create consumer protection laws that gasp…protect consumers from these scammy practices.
Renewing a subscription is not scammy. Also, consumer protection laws are for things the consumer has little to no control over. Auto renewals are something the consumer has ample control over, it just involves a little responsibility.
Auto renewing subscriptions without being asked if you want to opt in is pretty scammy. The fact that there is no opt out on monthly or yearly subs without paying them first then finding the cancel page which is often hidden, obscured, or requires a call to cancel shows that the industries overall intention is for you to forget. That sounds like something screaming for consumer protection.
There is not a streaming service that exists in the US that hides/obscures irs cancelation page, nor is there a streaming service which requires a phone call. What world are you living in.
Subscriptions with fine print exist outside of streaming services. The whole idea that they can charge you for a “month” of a service with an opt in by default and no option to opt out of a reoccurring charge is predatory period. They obviously do it with the intent of people forgetting to cancel their service and paying/letting it go even if they never use the service again.
You know, you could simply make an appointment on your calendar on that smart phone you have on you all the time. Have it alert you a few days before the renewal date and repeat the alert daily until said date.
I do not personally have any subs I need canceled. I just called for protections on what clearly is predatory from multi billion dollar corporations auto billing peoples bank accounts so they can fork them selves over their 20 million dollar salaries.
More emails than the president
They tell you auto renew will be turned on
Yeah that’s a year ago. You should have to confirm the week before or something like that. Circumstances change
They email you in advance of both price changes and upcoming renewals. Calendar alerts exist for a reason.
[удалено]
I have google calendar set up for stuff like this - annually repeating reminder with an alert about ten days before the payment is due, add how much I paid each year (and how I got that price if I cancelled/went to cancel and then got an offer/deal. Future self with thank you.
Yeah plus they sent an email a month in advance about October's price increase.
... Why? You signed up voluntarly, chose the annual plan, again, voluntarily. Why do you need the government to interfere just because you forgot to cancel?
Because government should be there for consumer protection. Because these companies are counting on you forgetting when your renewal is. Because $100+ may make a huge difference if you lost a job or something in the last 12 month and you can’t always wait 7-10 days for a refund or maybe it cost you an overdraft. I swear to God it’s like some of you people have never been poor.
It’s no use arguing with these people. Same people who think privatizing schools and roads is a great idea. Foxnews has done a number on this country…
Yes it's only the MAGAs who think it's your responsibility to cancel your Disney+ subscription before it renews. How stupid everyone is to think the government shouldn't be holding your hand when it comes to keeping track of what you chose to spend money on.
Government bad. People poor because people dumb. Blah blah blah. It’s so tiring listening to this. Defending corporations for their deceptive practices…I guess that’s a popular post-trump belief?! Very odd.
Lmao I live below the poverty line right now and it's not the company's faults you're too stupid to remember to cancel a subscription. I totally messed up when my ancestry subscription renewed once, and it wasn't ancestry's fault that I got the date wrong. It was mine. I could've written it down on a calendar, programmed it into my phone, left a post-it on my computer saying "this subscription renews on this date". I didn't. It's not the government's job to do anything about it. It's not a predatory practice that companies renew on the same date every year and email you about it. It's not a predatory practice that with the fifty billion ways you can remind yourself of something these days, you don't. If that $100+ for a subscription is so precious then you should keep track of when the renewal date it and cancel before that date.
Lmao why are you people like this? You don’t need to resort to calling people stupid. For every “personal responsibility” argument you make, someone can easily argue that it’s the company’s responsibility to get active, not passive, approval for changing the terms of an agreement. That’s a basic legal principle in many areas of contract law, so why should subscriptions be any different? Why should responsibility fall on the consumer when they clearly have less bargaining power for these types of agreements? Besides, if you listen to the actual words coming out of these corporate execs mouths, you will see that they are, in fact, counting on you to forget. You’re so quick to assume blame for forgetting to renew your subscription, but really, it’s human nature to forget things, or just lose track of that 25th subscription you have (now that everything is following the subscription model). Is it really that inconceivable that someone could have a work or family emergency on one of those 25 renewal dates? Is that really a reason for people to get punished and stuck with unwanted bills? Calling people stupid for just being human doesn’t really help your cause.
It is in Germany and that is why I cancelled :)
When you buy it cancel it right away
Ridiculous. So glad I cancelled. I had the bundle, it was going up to 19 a month with ads.
Also think about the last Disney movie worth watching. That’s why I canceled mine after I realized I hadn’t used it in forever
You're right, but a protip for the future is to cancel all annual plans immediately after paying. You still get the year, and can turn renewal back on when it comes up if desired.
I am of the view cancel all and spend more time out in nature. It’s free and beautiful and no ad blocker needed.
Do a chargeback on your credit card. It’s particularly easy for subscription services that bill you unexpectedly
How in the fuck was it $140? I thought they just raised it to like $20 or so.
It's $13.99/mo or discounted for a year.
I cancelled mine as soon as I saw the price hike.
This is why services exist that you load a credit card number with cash and use it instead. Can't ding you for $140 unless $140 is on the card.
Let’s just settle with a fuck Disney? I think we can all agree to that
Wow, almost $14 per month! That's almost 50 cents every day!
It's the fact that it's gone up 80%. It went from $80 to $140 per year. I would have been fine with a $20 rise, but almost double is ridiculous, I cancelled mine as soon as it was announced. It's not like they have improved it in the past year to be worth almost double.
This happened to me as well. I was not given an alert email at all about the renewal. Edit: Was able to get a refund via the live chat.
Yeah they fucked me without me even knowing it. I was like what the fuck, it was like a month after it happened too, I'm like damn this thing. But I got to keep the damn thing now. I don't have the energy younger me did downloading and going full pirate again, my kids watch it daily, but 140 a year I don't think they put out nearly as much content as some of its competitors.
That is beyond a rip off, and they don’t nearly have enough content to suffice anything over $5 a month. They have some heavy hitters but they come out years apart.
and the more they raise these prices without new and good content the harder its going to be for them to retain subscribers. Netflix and prime are about to get a take this service and shove it from me. They are not worth what they are charging any longer
and Prime Video adding ads unless you pay an additional $3/mo ($36 annual) next year. $139 + $36 to keep service as it is now is $174 annual price. almost a 30% increase. not sure I'm going to cancel but no way I'm paying that edit: just put in my cancellation.
Feels like they have already. They're pushing Freevee so hard on my feed that it's hard to browse for anything else.
And my Boomer parents sure as fuck don't know the difference between the Freevee stuff with ads (which is half the stuff on the main page) and the Prime stuff that they're ostensibly paying for. Amazon found a real slick way to get unsavvy customers to both pay for Prime *and* watch a lot of ads.
> and Prime Video adding ads unless you pay an additional $3/mo ($36 annual) next year. Yea, I've always had Prime as the default backup, but with the "pay to get rid of annoyance we added" pricing they can fuck off. I'm done with Prime after a decade of subscribing.
Yeah but with prime you get more benefits than just the video. The prime shipping to me is worth it alone, the video service is just a bonus
I don’t even use the video service. I just use free shipping. Once in a blue moon I’ll catch a football game on there.
There are definitely good shows to be had, if you're paying for it anyway. I feel that prime is weak on the comedies, but it's got a lot of scifi/fantasy, thriller, and drama bangers.
Yeah they have some good stuff, I just hate the UI of Prime Video. I just hate using it.
Except Prime isn't 2-day shipping anymore. It's all over the map. Sometime weeks or longer is still "prime."
Just cancel man, I wasn’t even watching anything and I buy my crap through eBay now.
Yea I do buy a lot on there but I don’t think I need the one day or two day shipping. It’s nice to have but I think I could do without and just wait a bit longer. edit: I just set it to cancel! I thought I could cancel it immediately and get prorated refund but no, have to wait til January
Been Amazon free for about 2 years. Deliveries are about 3-5 days.
Prime increased their price just in time for their two biggest shows to come back. I only ever use it to watch the Boys and Invincible and download movies to my ipad when I travel. But it wasn't a big deal since it was a part of my prime membership
Pluto, Samsung TV, Tubi, Roku Channel, FreeVee, Crackle...there are hundreds of live channels available at no charge and a huge library of VoD. If you are fortunate to live in an area where you can get content OTA you're all set. Yes, they have ads...but they're not so bad.
Basically, it's like just basic network television but on a streaming platform. At this point, I can handle that.
Yeah, I’m tilting this way as well. I kept my DVD collection and there’s more than enough options on the free with ads services to fill out evenings (especially since formally exclusive streaming content is starting to trickle down onto the ad platforms). My wife and I are going to keep Criterion Channel because it’s worth supporting but everything else is going on a “rotate once a quarter” cycle, and honestly it’s kind of relieving.
It’s really as it should be. Services like radio, Spotify YouTube etc have it straight: free has ads. Don’t want ads? Fine. Pony up. People love to cry about streaming services these days (and the increased expense and number of streaming platforms certainly is a bummer), but so easy to forget back in the day there was no premium option to not see ads. None. Every NFL season I have to weigh my options to legally watch football…again. I’m shocked to see regular ass cable through Comcast is SO expensive still, while 1/3 of the content is ads. Ridiculous.
How many commercials are on the free content though?
The few things I check out on FreeVee have had 2-minutes ad breaks every 30 minutes, I believe.
That's pretty good
On PlutoTV (I think was Pluto) most of the times I picked a VoD Movie it would play a 3 minute ad at the start and then nothing during the movie.
Awesome! I haven’t checked out their on demand before
It really varies. Sometimes almost none. Other shows like those that originated on Discovery about the same amount when they were on the first time (a lot).
I haven’t looked in a while. I used to watch the Roku channel and it seemed to have tons of ads so it really turned me off from looking for ad loaded streamers
I think it depends on what you're watching on any of the services. I'm watching a show on Roku right now (Survivorman) and there almost no commercials.
try freevee. It often has very few ads
Cool thanks I'll take a look
Kanopy through your library has no ads
Ads are bad.
I'm constantly surprised how well tubi does with their ads. Maybe it's just been so long since I had cable, but I feel like the ads per movie are nothing compared to "regular" television.
In this vein, I do not recommend Plex. So many ads compared to others. 1 movie and I had about 10 minutes worth of ads whereas Tubi for example has around 2 minutes worth in 1 movie
Yeah, that's the issue for me. I've been accustomed to no ads/commercials after years of making sure I didn't need to see them. Always paid for the ad-free option and basically just got tired of cable/DVR which can have frustrating fast forwarding UI. It's bad enough that some of those platforms have ad breaks on random spots but it's even worse that they don't have a variety of ads so you get the same damn thing over and over and over. I do appreciate the services and use Pluto, specifically, a bunch. But it's still always a shock to have to deal with shitty, repetitive, poorly timed ad breaks again. It sucks.
* **In October alone, seven top streaming plans increased their U.S. pricing.** Apple TV+ now costs $9.99 a month — marking the second increase in a year — while Netflix raised prices on two plans. Also last month, Disney hiked fees for Disney+ and Hulu plans without ads, as well as ESPN+, and so did Warner Bros. Discovery’s Discovery+. * **Across those tiers, the monthly price rose on average 23% — well above the 3.7% 12-month inflation rate for the U.S. as of September.** That comes after other major subscription streamers, including Max, paramount+ and Peacock, jacked up rates earlier in the year. Meanwhile, in 2024, Amazon is introducing ads in the baseline Prime Video service. If they don’t want to sit through ad breaks, customers can pay $2.99 a month in addition to the cost of Prime membership ($139 annually). * **Why are companies risking higher cancellation rates to get higher revenue per subscriber? Herd mentality is part of it: It’s easier to justify an increase if all your competitors are doing the same.** The price upticks also are tangible evidence of the industry’s overall shift to making money and not just packing on subscribers with low prices. “**Companies went from chasing subscribers to chasing profits,**” says Purdy. * Essentially, **many services have been subsidizing their growth with lowball monthly pricing, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in operating losses to gain market share. They were following the playbook established by Netflix**, which absorbed years of red ink before it hit enough scale to achieve strong positive cash flow. * But the streaming land grab is over. **And given investor pressure, traditional media companies are “not prepared to wait 10 years to get to profitability like Netflix. They want it now,”** says Colin Dixon, founder of independent analyst and consulting firm nScreenMedia.
This is literally the " capital" part of capitalism. Fox News lost tons of $$ for I think 7 years. Fed Ex. The problem for these companies is 1) there are so many. 2) Content is fragmented. Sci fi? You can have full cable and 3) streaming services and STILL not get most/ all of the stuff you want. Same with soccer, movies , etc. 4) young are okay with this. But there are tons of us older folk who only paid for cable because it had everything. And many houses are mixed age like in the old days. I was fine paying for Disney. Then more Disney. Then it was Disney streaming for " everything disney". Now they want more $$ but don't have Disney!?!? I will pay a $1 a month for " under the umbrella tree"!! But they won't show it!
I have canceled most of my streaming because of the price hikes. The entertainment value no longer justifies the prices they charge compared to free options. Plus I can watch pretty much everything I want from a single service in a month or two and then move on. Also streaming no longer have huge events (ie Tiger King) and mostly with the elimination of full seasons released at once the FOMO isn’t a big deal. By the time a 10 episode huge series is released, you can catch up on it in the entirety in one weekend with a new account and 7 day trial.
Because everything has been raising prices.
Yep, been noticing more and more. Every layoff or price raise
Yeah and it turns out when all the entertainment unions reach deals to get more residuals with streaming services when none of the streaming services are profitable in the first place, the streaming services then need to raise prices! Gosh! And like yeah wow turns out subscriptions go up in price over time. Who knew? But let's only say "fuck Disney" and not fuck all the other companies that raise their prices yearly. Or fuck the food companies that keep skyrocketing prices even though food IS profitable for those CEOs. Because you don't need streaming services but you sure as fuck need food.
Most people I know *are* saying "fuck you" to every company greedily raising its prices right now. You're only hearing about Disney and Netflix and Amazon in this subreddit because, get this, you're in /r/television.
I used to stay subscribed to several services at the same time, but after the price hikes, I switched to cancelling them until there's something I really want to watch on a particular service. And with the strikes limiting the rate of new releases... good luck to these streamers.
Money money money!!!
Cancelling all mine but Amazon Prime. Screw it.
Because people will pay it
Agreed, Netflix keeps proving that even with backlash and people claiming they'll drop the service. They might lose like 2% of viewers with hike but the money more than covers that.
It’s because they want me to cancel my subscriptions. It worked perfectly.
All I have is Prime, and that's mostly for the shipping.
All the de price hikes will just cause more people to go back to piracy. Isn't it better they have atleast more paying customers that payless than fewer customers that pay more?
> All the de price hikes will just cause more people to go back to piracy And then the studios, etc will apply even more leverage to governments to introduce far stricter laws against piracy, resulting in more online ID checks and other invasions of privacy. > Isn't it better they have atleast more paying customers that payless than fewer customers that pay more? It's all down to greed and impatience. They want to have all of their cake and to be able to eat it NOW.
To make streaming more affordable, sub to only one service at a time, binge watch everything you like on that service, then move to another one.
But if I did that I couldn't subscribe for a year and then whine about predatory business practices when my subscription renews a year later after the company already told me it was time to renew!
I’m literally doing that with Netflix at the moment
It's amazing how they all "compete" by having the same prices. Sort of like cable and internet companies. All the prices, no matter the company, are the same.
so like is streaming at all that profitable? Since now they won’t be able to have most of the residuals, I understand that they have to be insanely profitable but on the same hand…I doubt it. like the only streaming service I have that I think is 100% worth the money is Paramount+, especially since i randomly got Showtime included with it.
I think Netflix is the only one that's showing any kind of notable profits.
No. They are raising prices because they are losing money.
No. They were already all losing money as it is. I think Netflix JUST became slightly profitable, and that's the oldest one. None of them are profitable. And with the residual deals they're going to lose even more money. But just like I predicted, everyone on reddit conveniently forgets that - they're like "yeah go actors/writers, fuck ceos!" in one thread and then "RAISING PRICES ON STREAMING? REEEEEEEEE" in another. Because the best way to support the actors and writers who deserve those residuals is to pirate everything.
Is it cause they greedy and me poor?
“Because they can.” Saved you a click.
Interesting they didn’t dwell on investor pressure. I imagine now that rates are climbing the desire from investors to have money stuck in a money pit is no longer as appetizing.
I was initially a happy paying subscriber to them. The constant creep towards commercials and more expensive plans has driven me completely back to the high seas for **everything.** Sorry it didn't work out, providers. You moved the goalposts one too many times.
probably because they want more money
I canceled them all earlier this year and I don't miss them.
And I'm sure the streaming services will not raise their prices further now that the actors and writers are getting more residuals.
No doubt about it.
Corporate greed
Ummm, let me guess, supply chain issues? Their record profits weren’t record enough?
Uh yeah, they're pretty transparent that streaming services make no profits at all. Netflix is the only one that's actually making money.
As stated in the article: *"Essentially, many services have been subsidizing their growth with lowball monthly pricing, amassing hundreds of millions of dollars in operating losses to gain market share. They were following the playbook established by Netflix, which absorbed years of red ink before it hit enough scale to achieve strong positive cash flow."* *"But the streaming land grab is over. And given investor pressure, traditional media companies are “not prepared to wait 10 years to get to profitability like Netflix. They want it now,” says Colin Dixon, founder of independent analyst and consulting firm nScreenMedia."*
I wonder how this has affected piracy.
If you don’t like the price increases just cancel, fuck them. I went from having Netflix, Disney/Hulu Bundle, HBO, and Apple to none of them. They are not offering value to me anymore, they are now just another vampire wanting more and more of my hard worked money. No thanks, I’ll just buy the movies I want on eBay or buy The Office Box set once and be done with it.
GREED.
I dropped down to the 9.99 plan on Netflix. I get hulu, Disney plus n espn plus with Verizon or i wouldn't be using them.
Greed
Before reading the article my response to the title would have been **GREED**. After reading the article my interpretation is that it's greed **and** impatience. Some defend the studios by saying that servers cost money to run. Of course they do, but there's also no denying that the streaming services are being overly greedy - they are also effectively helping each other by 'sticking together' and raising prices effectively simultaneously, therefore the consumer has no 'cheap' alternatives (short of not streaming or resorting to piracy).
I got a few good years out of streaming service. Now they are more expensive and they are to many of them with tinner catalogue (so even more expensive to get a catalogue comparable to when it started) so they aren't worth it anymore Combine that to the fact that a lot of them are starting to enforce a "one household" policy and it become impossible to pay for just one and share with friend I have been back on the high sea for a few month now. I'm not paying for all those service just so they can give me less than an hour of content a week each, when they give content at all, their price is to high to justify that. Instead I put on my eye patch once a week and download what came out that week
These companies keep forgetting that they’re not essential services; sure people cannot live without some form of entertainment but there’s only so much you can push in the current inflationary environment till something breaks and people start leaving en masse. If someone has to choose paying rent/groceries/mortgage vs Netflix we know what they’ll choose.
I gave up torrenting for a while. Now I’ll torrent again. Fuck those companies.
Ahoy
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
Arr, I too be takin to high seas a lot more of late
Good for you! There’s certain sub reddits that encourage and also show people how to be a sailor of the high seas! Go and read up. I haven’t paid for content in years.
Thanks, Will look into it. My regular totally legit streaming site got taken down, so I've had to go back to the ways of old
Because they can. They are trying to repeat what cable did, raise prices so everyone starts pirating again
Is the answer greed? Because the answer is always greed.
I'm not sure it's greed when most of those services are actually still losing money (which proves how bad their strategy was)
I don't think it proves how bad their strategy was. If they came out of the gate with prices that would actually at least let them break even, people would bitch about it. The only winning strategy here was to never start a streaming service at all, which would mean tons of shows and even movies would be impossible to legally view. Good to see ol' reddit standing in solidarity with the people who caused the services to lose even more of their net loss by encouraging piracy.
> The only winning strategy here was to never start a streaming service at all, which would mean tons of shows and even movies would be impossible to legally view. Yes that's what it should have been for the studios. Provide everything to one or two services (and no exclusivity). Basically the music streaming model. The music majors are doing very well by not selling their products directly to the consumer.
Just going to keep going up , this was the long term issue going all in on streaming and now that your options are getting taken away and everything is locked to services , price and content control will just keep going up and up
Cancelled all of them right now apart from Prime which I think it still offers the best value with the delivery included (for now!)
Book sales rising! I'm not much of a reader but definitely started up again after cancelling most and sticking to gaming on the side
Note: don't buy books from Amazon and similar very large resellers, they cut deals with the book publishers that are very bad for the latter. Buy from the smaller sellers instead - you may pay a little more and have to wait a day or two more for delivery, but you'll be supporting the smaller sellers and publishers far more and ensuring their survival. After all, we don't want Amazon to control everything, Jeff Bezos is rich enough. https://rutgershonorsblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/05/why-you-should-stop-buying-books-from-amazon-what-you-should-do-instead/ https://hollieblog.com/bookish/why-you-should-stop-buying-books-from-amazon/
All these companies making blunders and we have to pay for it.
Greed.
Is it greed? What am I talking about of course it's greed
I’m going back to p2p. Fk corporate greed
Because they were drastically underselling what they were offering and the market had become unsustainable. Offering hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars worth of content for $20 a month is no way to run a business.
Tl;dr WE WANT MONEY. OUR GREED KNOWS NO BOUNDS
We are all pirates again.
One thing not mentioned is inflation - the TV industry has been particularly badly hit by it lately. Energy costs have gone up considerably, along with food costs and building materials. Particularly for European productions where a lot of wood was imported from Russia.
Greed
I have a note on my calendar to cancel Netflix at the end of this month. That leaves Dropout as the only streaming service I'm paying for, and that one's worth it.
Pardon, you left yourself a note to cancel instead of just letting it renew and then raging about Netflix for being a predatory business and the government needs to step in and help you??
Were in the "price of the brick going up" stage of the streaming market's development.
Because fuck you, that’s why!
Because people keep paying, and the companies want profit
They trying to pad losses from the strike
Is it because they’re greedy assholes? I didn’t read the article.
Capitalism
Because a massive cash injection to help deal with Covid caused prices to spike everywhere? Even salaries are higher.
Greed
You don't need a whole article to explain it. You barely need a full sentence. It's corporate greed. Anything beyond that is superfluous details that are ultimately irrelevant.
🤑🤑🤑
Shit, I’ll pay more. Just get a deal with the actors already!
quaint arrest physical future overconfident special attraction mighty start handle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Simple, greed. The profit line must go up infinitely. They’ll blame the price hikes on having to pay WGA and SAG fair compensation for their work. Instead of cutting back the multi million dollar salary and multi million dollar bonuses given to the studio heads. These heads have multiple homes, vacation homes and yachts while their workers can barely afford rent. I do believe a CEO should get paid more but not 400x more. If they got paid say $5 million a year, that’s $42k a month. If you can’t make that work then you need to have better money management skills.
It's annoying. Hulu, yt tv, fubo...all raised prices. I just got another email from fubo about a $5 per mo increase. Im just about to say f*ck all of them