As you all know, Disney has been mumbling about a possible cheaper, ad-supported tier for Disney+. We didn’t think it was necessary because at $7.99 a month for an insanely great library, Disney+ is priced just fine. They disagreed….boy, did they disagree. There’s bad news ahead but we’ll get to it.
Today Disney confirmed those plans will become reality this holiday season, with the atomic split of its streaming service into two separate tiers: Disney+ Basic and Disney+ Premium. Disney+ Basic will contain advertising, as expected, but rather minimal: for example, an hour-long program would contain one 15 or 30 second ad at the beginning, plus one ad appearing at the 20 and 40 second marks. That is significantly less than plans from rival streamers including Disney’s own Hulu, which runs three ads per break on its cheaper tier.
Sounds good, right? Hold it just a second. We haven’t discussed what the price is going to be. Up to now it was assumed the ad tier would cost less than what Disney+ costs now and the ad-less version would cost one buck more at the most. Uh, Disney has decided to jack the cost of a monthly ad-less subscription by THREE BUCKS and make the current price of Premium the price of Basic. They blathered some intelligence-insulting nonsense about this being a “great value” in some universe (Bizarro World maybe, but that’s DC, not Marvel).
To make things clear, this December Disney+ Premium will be $10.99 per month and Disney+ Basic will be $7.99. Also, there will be no Annual option for Basic at all. Sucks.
In fact, now that I ponder on it, the whole strategy here seems to be to force most Americans to subscribe to the cheaper option and get the ads, because they want an immediately large userbase for that tier to impress advertisers into lining up. There’s logic to that, but it comes with a cost of subscriber satisfaction.
Can you temporarily dodge this by switching to Annual in November and paying the original price for twelve months in advance? I can’t confirm that’ll work, but it’s your only hope now. Disney+ splits in two this December.
