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Television The Almighty Buck Youtube

Disney+ Explores a Free Tier As YouTube Draws TV Viewers (businessinsider.com) 40

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Disney is exploring a free tier for Disney+ that would make some content available without a subscription. According to Nielsen data, the three largest free streamers accounted for 18.7% of watch time on U.S. TVs in April, up from 16.8% a year earlier and 12.7% in April 2024. Business Insider reports: Product and tech chief Adam Smith spoke about enabling free-tier content during a streaming town hall on Thursday afternoon, one staffer said. Smith didn't share a timeline for this initiative or a sense of the scope, this person added. A person familiar with Disney's streaming strategy said these talks are part of an ongoing discussion about concepts to better serve fans. Currently, the Disney+ and Hulu bundle costs $12.99 a month with ads or $19.99 without ads at full price.

Disney+ Explores a Free Tier As YouTube Draws TV Viewers More | Reply

Disney+ Explores a Free Tier As YouTube Draws TV Viewers

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  • Disney can offer all the free content it wants. Great for the kids. But for us older crowds, our household has started watching more YouTube content. User created content can be awful yes but say you enjoy hiking and travel. There are tons of videos on YouTube of actually persons visiting state parks and showing off the pros and cons of what they offer. I don't think they can replace YouTube for that at least.

    • I've never really considered any of the user-created videos on YouTube as being living room TV content. I'm not gonna sit down to a plate of Chipotle and put on a video of someone repairing their car, though I might certainly watch the same thing on my iPad while I've got my brakes in million pieces.

  • Television Model (Score:3)

    by Koreantoast ( 527520 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @02:22PM (#66231798)
    So, content produced and broadcasted freely to the public funded by advertisements that are weaved into the show. Haven't we seen this model before?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dysmal ( 3361085 )

      Those who fail history class are doomed to repeat it

      • Obviously it was a viable business model before and it can continue to be one today. Their is literally no failings here and being "doomed" into a profitable business model, well gee, what a hardship upon them. Can someone please "doom" me into a profitable business model, please?!

    • It even pre-dates television. Lots of golden age radio shows had advertisements not just weaved into the show, but were outright named after the sponsors.

      The Ford Sunday Evening Hour
      The General Electric Concert
      Kraft Music Hall
      Maxwell House Showboat
      Palmolive Beauty Box Theater
      Philip Morris Playhouse ...just to name a few.

      This trend only continued once television became widespread. My favorite is the the Colgate Comedy Hour! A whole hour of toothpaste commercials interspersed with variety acts.

      Everything old

      • It even pre-dates television. Lots of golden age radio shows had advertisements not just weaved into the show, but were outright named after the sponsors.

        Don't forget about The Truman Show.

  • . . . the first hit for free.

    • Luckily for us, Disney doesn't really offer anything interesting to watch anyway. You'd have to pay me to waste time on Disney.

  • More and more of their legacy content is becoming public domain and modern generations not restricted to just TV and Cinemas are watching different companies characters so the old strategy of the vault has been cracked. Disney is Diswho to the average brainrot viewer and they need to come up with some new ideas instead of recycling the same old stories.

  • You might want to check out the book, "Television is the New Television", by Michael Wolff. Ten years after this book was published, corporations are still doing the media-shuffle pretty much as outlined in this book.

  • $20 for ad free
    $15 for w/ads

    Would free be
    $0 w/MOAR Ads!

    Or would it be a limited selection of content, stuff comes out first on the paid subs levels?

    Something even more aggravating and dickish like the first 8 episodes of whatever free, but oh look you have to subscribe to get episodes 9 and 10?

    Regardless of what youtube and Tubi etc might be doing there is psychology in play here that I expect is going to leave either subscribers or would-be subscribers feeling resentful about the model.

    • Might be longer time gates on the movies and so on?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Yeah.... I can't imagine Disney+ or Hulu giving away a meaningful amount of free content considering that they already suckered their users into paying $15 a month for maybe 20 hours a month of fresh content that contains about 20% advertising. It wasn't always like that, but they slowly enshittified the product knowing that kids are already hooked on it.

      Maybe it's a ploy to get people to watch the first episode or two of a new series in the hopes that they will get them hooked? I know that Apple TV does th

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Yeah,

        I kinda like Disney+, my family and I do watch quite a bit of content on it. It has gone down hill some though. I don't really pay for the ad tier it is bundled with my wife's mobile plan (so yes I do pay for it) but that bundle includes other features/services/tethering rules we want and is still the most economic to get them, at least without completely switching carriers.

        I don't think I'd be a subscriber if we had to pay 'full rate'

    • Free will likely be just ads, like that radio station from Demolition Man.

    • It's free. Bitch all you want about it. Don't like ads? Then pay for it. I always pay extra for no ads. I'm glad it's an option, as I can't stand wasting my time with the ads.

      I'd also ignore all bitching from people on the free model because, you aren't paying anyway. Enjoy your ads, mooches.

  • No thanks, I'm good (Score:3, Informative)

    by Cpt_Kirks ( 37296 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @02:33PM (#66231814)

    I had a free D+ subscription for a while.

    Older Disney stuff is good, the new stuff is 100% woke garbage.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I had a free D+ subscription for a while.

      Then your wife died at Disneyworld due to a food allergy and you weren't allowed to sue?

    • It's not "woke" that is bad, it's the fact that it is lazy and incredibly stupid, as if it was made by the most inept nepobabbies simply because they can. I grew up with both men and women as heroic characters, and it wasn't that bad. What is bad is that everyone who is in charge of writing ignores what makes writing works, and with all the tools at their disposal, there is no excuse. So I am thinking it is deliberate(ly stupid).

  • I wonder how long this completely artificial content split will last? On the one hand, they charge more because they can (weakly) pretend you're getting TWO channels rather than one... but, on the other hand, the high mucky-mucks always want to slap their own single brand all over everything.

    • Yeah. I've wondered that myself. One of those should really go away, and since they're trying to boost Disney+ by putting all the Hulu content on it, I think it's clear which should go.

      But there may be licensing and contractual reasons not to. There may be some rider on Hulu from back when it was a joint venture, or from when Disney bought or bought out the others. If not, they probably still won't want to discard Disney+, because they're Disney. They won't want to get rid of Hulu, because that's th

    • I wonder how long this completely artificial content split will last?

      Disney has stated that they intend to finish rolling Hulu into the Disney+ experience by the end of the year. However, I have no doubt they will still have a pricing differential of the additional Hulu content (just like Amazon has Prime Video and MGM+ for "extra" content, or Paramount+ vs Paramount+ Premium).

  • Free tier? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @05:51PM (#66232038)

    Translation: 20-25 minutes of content, 35-40 minutes of ads, per hour. No thanks, I cut the cord 30 years ago because of too many ads. Not going back. Disney thinking about introducing a free tier smacks of desperation. Has the greed finally started to erode things to a distasteful level?

    • I'm not sure Disney needs to worry much about inserting ads into streams; the low effort direct-to-video sequels they churn out are effectively merch and theme park ads.

      If they give away access to that crap, they'll make it up on plushies and clothing and theme park ticket sales.

  • They Can Suck It! (Score:3)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @06:00PM (#66232048)

    I've already got ads in my subscriptions. They can take their ad infested "free" tier and jam it up their ass. These streaming services deserve bankruptcy.

    There are literally less ads on Xumo. For the moment...

  • Disney's biggest problem (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The_Revelation ( 688580 ) on Friday July 10, 2026 @07:05PM (#66232126)
    Is a lack of a parental filter. I'm not comfortable with their woke content nor do I feel it necessary for her to watch content with pre-teen homosexuality or transgender characters in much the same way that I, as a parent, wouldn't want the kids shows to be about r-rated sex scenes or about topics like abortion or birth defects. I'd just like a filter for age appropriate content which effectively requires disney to provide a filter to hide anything they've made for the past 15 years.
  • I can't name a single production Disney have made in over 10 years that I wanted to watch. Getting shit for free? It's still shit.
    See how much of your data they want to harvest and sell on before signing up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Same. As far as I am concerned, if Disney falls of the fact of the earth tomorrow, I would not even notice.

  • When Disney+ started, it was a great value: everything Disney ever made (aside from the stuff now so cringe it's been memory-holed) plus high-quality new content on a weekly basis. For a genre nerd who likes Marvel and Star Wars, it was rare that Disney+ didn't earn its pay in any given week.

    But that was expensive and creatively difficult to maintain. So the price went up, the quality went down, and then the cadence of high-quality original content slowed. Library content disappeared to save on royalty chec

  • Stop hiring sick fucks that make content trying to convince young kids that they're trans.

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