Disney+ loses 700k subscribers following price increase

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/05/disney-plus-subscriber-decrease/

by mgh2 • 1 year ago

75 77 1 year ago

I remember when ad-free was $7/mo.

All good things come to an end. Here we are, 6 years later, with 128% markup.

We’re also at the level where you need to watch more than 4 Disney movies per week (edit: month, typo) to justify not renting. For some families this is easy - for my childhood, where we had one “movie night” per week, this would have been a tough sell.

jjice• 1 year ago

4 per week? I see the ad-free price now is $16. 4 per week would be 16 per month. Most rentals I've seen (through something like Amazon) run $4. Am I missing a cheaper rental service that runs about $1 per film?

stego-tech• 1 year ago

While they still existed, yes: video stores. Catalog movies (that is, not new releases) could often be had for $1 a night.

Most were run out of business due to streaming, but if you have one nearby, it’s almost certainly cheaper and better quality than streaming. Plus you’d be supporting a local business in the process.

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

Am I missing a cheaper rental service that runs about $1 per film?

Your local public library?

In some cities, they're really well stocked when it comes to video. And many have video streaming services, or sometimes even "community" subscriptions to Netflix or whatever that you can check out for a week at a time.

Your tax dollars at work.

stevekemp• 1 year ago

Am I missing a cheaper rental service that runs about $1 per film?

Honestly where I am I can buy used DVDs for €1 each. I actually went out and bought a DVD player to connect to my TV a year or so ago, because the price was just so compelling.

One benefit to physical DVDs are that they can't disappear like a streaming-service can, you paid for it and you get to own it "forever". DVDs often have subtitles, which is nice for language-learners like me.

(I used to stream content from my PC, via VLC, to a chromecase, but subtitles were never streamed. That was annoying, but not a huge deal.)

It might not apply to all, and local shops are very expensive for "new" releases, but if you have a lot of used stores DVDs are essentially free for both TV series and films.

mcphage• 1 year ago

you need to watch more than 4 Disney movies per week to justify not renting

How so? At $16/month, that's 1 $4 rental per week. Or are you getting $1 rentals somewhere?

rdsnsca• 1 year ago

DVD"s sell at flea markets / yard sales for $1 doller each here.

burkaman• 1 year ago

A decrease of about 0.6% of the subscriber base after a much larger than 0.6% price increase, so I'm guessing they consider this a success.

itishappy• 1 year ago

"Disney+ gains $480 in revenue following price increase"

jve• 1 year ago

Less users means less operational cost I guess.

bachmeier• 1 year ago

I'm guessing they consider this a success.

I'm sure they do. Of course that doesn't count the number of new subscribers they would have had, but didn't get. Or the number of future subscribers they won't get. Or the current subscribers that will cancel in six months. And of course when they see the worse-than-expected subscriber base in a year, they'll use that as the justification for another "successful" price increase. (Anyone that had cable 15 years ago knows what I'm talking about.)

indeed30• 1 year ago

I would be pretty confident that Disney has a pricing team whose entire job is to model those effects.

robertlagrant2• 1 year ago

Well, also they have reduced scaling costs as well, so they need adding in. But yes, I just renewed and I'm getting keener on not renewing again.

xphilter• 1 year ago

With all the accounting tricks it’s probably hard to know if this was a success. Likely there is a large share of the user base on trial periods or partner offers (e.g., free with T-Mobile)

n144q• 1 year ago

That's almost a negligible number considering the additional revenue the price increase brought in.

Ralfp• 1 year ago

Together with price raise they stopped doing voice over in my language for new content and I’ve been watching it mostly together with my parents. Seeing how I’ve didnt watch anything on it for two months, I guess time to cancell to.

josefresco• 1 year ago

Disney's overall revenue grew 4.8 percent

Is there a breakdown for just Disney+? As others have pointed out, losing 700K subs seems like a win considering the cost went up 15%-25%.

mossTechnician• 1 year ago

Does ending your subscription also end your agreement to their Terms of Service?

lobo_tuerto• 1 year ago

I don't think so. So watch out if you have any allergies and go and eat something at Disneyland. ;)

graemep• 1 year ago

A resounding success then. A negligible loss of customers in the face of a 25% price increase.

gherkinnn• 1 year ago

These companies must be trying how far they can go before piracy starts being the easier solution again.

hotpocket777• 1 year ago

It already is

sparsely• 1 year ago

For example subtitles are terrible on most major streaming services, either don't exist, or are only available in one language. Sometimes they don't even have the original audio track, only a dubbed one! Piracy ensures that multi-language families can happily watch a movie together.

randunel8• 1 year ago

The only reason piracy isn't easy is because of TV vendors gatekeeping what software these TVs run.

Unless you use Plex, which allows your own content (but still disallows torrent streaming or sharing your analog TV with your users, so not ideal), you're SOL.

PetitPrince• 1 year ago

Unless you use Plex, which allows your own content [...] you're SOL.

... how about connecting a computer to your TV ? Inconvenient depending on your setup, but not hopeless.

reaperducer2• 1 year ago

Unless you use Plex, which allows your own content

Or just use an AppleTV, which comes with a built-in program called "Computer" that lets you stream your own content from any Mac on the LAN.

I have about 400 movies and thousands of TV shows that I stream this way, in subscription-free bliss.

The content comes from CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays from the library or my own purchases; and I have a $20 gadget that records OTA TV shows and movies onto a USB stick.

dmix• 1 year ago

I use https://airflow.app/ and google cast, worked on every tv I've bought for a decade. I've recently gone back to using that 100% of the time and never use Netflix/Disney.

Pirate streaming android apps on those TV boxes aren't worth the effort IMO, they are flaky and stream sources die off, torrents are always easier.

jzb3• 1 year ago

There's Plex, but also things like Kodi that just turn a PC into a media center. We're in the midst of a move right now - when we settle, a Mini PC is going to replace the streaming box.

CaptainZapp• 1 year ago

What about just plugging an USB stick with whatever you want to watch into the TV?

Gormo8• 1 year ago

If you're not using the streaming apps, there's not much reason to use the software running on the TV in the first place.

There are plenty of cheap devices that offer set-top-box experiences, if that's your thing. A cheap Raspberry Pi running Kodi usually provides a superior experience to the TV's native software even for the streaming services -- I'm paying for Netflix, Disney+, and Paramount Plus and still prefer watching them through Kodi over using the TV's apps.

For local content, you don't need anything like Plex. Just plug mass storage directly into the TV, or a RasPi, or just host it on a local server with SMB or NFS. Synology has a Media Server application that can run on your NAS at no extra cost and exposes your media library via DLNA/UPnP, and there are many other such solutions floating around.

There are huge number of options here.

ibejoeb• 1 year ago

We're approaching that rapidly. I wanted to watch a college game on some incarnation of ESPN+, and it was a full day of negotiating with several divisions of Disney, the local provider, the reseller, and I don't even know who else... I probably could have gone to myfreesportscam.xyz or something and been good to go.

lawn• 1 year ago

It's been easier a long time due to fragmentation alone.

skoinks• 1 year ago

It's definitely easier... And cheaper. An HDMI cable costs less than a subscription for any streaming service.

antisthenes• 1 year ago

It never stopped being the easier solution if you were even a tiny bit technically literate.

jzb3• 1 year ago

"Starts"? We crossed that a while back. We're signed up to several services and it's basically the same price as cable used to be but with the added inconvenience of trying to navigate different apps and remembering "wait, was that show on Hulu, or Apple TV, or Netflix?"

To say nothing of the fact that, despite having access to what seems like an endless supply of content, it's really common to be unable to find a service that carries the movies or shows we'd like to see. I have a lengthy list of movies and TV shows that either have never made it to streaming, are only available for rental, or only have a partial showing. (e.g., only the first season of WKRP is available, it seems.)

Add to that the shit like Amazon adding ads even to the Prime subscription... eff that. Piracy is a lot more attractive if I can't even pay to get rid of ads.

rufus_foreman• 1 year ago

> never made it to streaming, are only available for rental, or only have a partial showing. (e.g., only the first season of WKRP is available, it seems.)

You could always own it forever: https://www.ebay.com/itm/167292774586?_skw=Wkrp+in+Cincinnat...

sebazzz• 1 year ago

Well, given that the want to move to minimum 1-year subscription during - pretty soon I’d say.

falcor843• 1 year ago

There's also another big issue with their new single household approach - there's now no way to have a single user across two devices on separate wi-fi networks, even if they're in the same area and even if you pay them for the extra sharing (you only get a new user). So that means that Disney+ no longer works for kids of divorced/separated parents. This is particularly frustrating given that other providers like Netflix, Prime, and Apple TV don't have this restriction.

bagels• 1 year ago

So, you're saying that I couldn't watch on my desktop at home, and on my laptop at school for instance?

falcor843• 1 year ago

The way I understand their mechanism, it lets you log in on a separate device, but will complain if you don't connect that device to your "household" wi-fi within a few days, and will then force you to either stop using your Disney+ account on that new device, or to transfer your "household" to its current wi-fi network, disabling the devices on the old network, and giving you a limited amount of such transfers.

So it's ok for phones/tablets/laptops that get moved around, but blocks usage on PCs or TVs across networks.

progforlyfe• 1 year ago

it's all so fucking stupid. why do they care WHERE you're watching the content if you're paying for 1, 2, ... N seats per month? Besides which country you're in, which I could understand.

maxsilver2• 1 year ago

Is this true? We still use Disney+ on two (three) wifi networks across two households (same kid, just different wifi networks) and it still seems to work just fine.

falcor843• 1 year ago

Here's the relevant documentation: https://help.disneyplus.com/en-US/article/disneyplus-subscri...

Hope for you that your situation somehow passes their detection and that it keeps working for you.

ubermonkey• 1 year ago

Bad headline. 700k is virtually nothing to them.

nozzlegear• 1 year ago

Does this account for the "seasonal" watching that some people do? For example, I subscribed to Disney+ to watch Skeleton Crew recently, and then unsubscribed when the season concluded. The price change didn't factor into my decision (I wasn't even aware their prices had changed).

carb• 1 year ago

There was a price increase, but there was also an explicit elevation of Disney+ from a "Pressure Target" to a "Priority Target" of the BDS movement last December.[1]

I know anecdotally dozens of people, including myself, who have made the sometimes difficult decision to cancel Disney+ subscriptions to avoid crossing the picket line. I haven't heard anyone making a fuss about the price increase, specifically.

[1] https://bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott

mrweasel• 1 year ago

While I do think streaming is becoming a bit to expensive. We have Disney+, Max and Netflix (which we could probably do without). Those combined are still cheaper than basic cable TV, by about $25 per year, with no ads and honestly better content.

My biggest annoyance is more that it's so difficult to find anything. I know Apple have attempted to fix that on the AppleTV, but it requires everyone to implement it and only Max seems to care to do that.

The music industry figured it out, it basically doesn't matter which service you subscribe to, they'll all have almost everything, it's stupid that the TV and movie industry can't come together an have a sort of clearing house for rights, but their making more money this way.

robertlagrant2• 1 year ago

Presumably it's because music is far cheaper to produce and distribute.

lotsofpulp• 1 year ago

I know Apple have attempted to fix that on the AppleTV, but it requires everyone to implement it and only Max seems to care to do that.

Netflix is the only one that does not make their content searchable in the TV app. You should be able to find all Disney/Comcast/AMC/Paramount/etc stuff in the TV app.

andyish• 1 year ago

If their target demo are families it's not a stretch to how two households would share the subscription and so the cost then with the price increase and their recently implement single household restrictions it's getting dropped.

waltercool• 1 year ago

I'm sure it's not jusy because of their price.

Most of their latest shows are just bad and not original et all.

Disney+ loses 700k subscribers following price increase

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