Opinion: Disney+ with Ads pricing disappoints
Disney unveiled upcoming price changes to its streaming service Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN this week. The company announced plans to increase the price of a Disney+ subscription by $3 to $10.99 per month in the United States.
The much awaited Disney+ with Ads plan will be available for $7.99 per month.
Starting December 8, 2022, Disney+ subscribers in the United States will have to pay an extra $3 per month to watch the streaming service's content without ads; this is a price increase of 38%.
Subscriptions for Hulu, which is also owned by Disney, will increase by $2 per month starting October 10, 2022.Subscribers have to pay $14.99 instead of $12.99 from that month onward. Hulu with ads pricing is raised from $6.99 per month to $7.99 per month. Last month, Disney announced that ESPN+ subscriptions would increase to $9.99 per month.
Disney's streaming services operate at a loss at the moment. Combined, Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ accumulated a loss of $1.1 billion in the fiscal third quarter, even though subscriber numbers continued to grow.
Disney has yet to announce Disney+ with ads pricing for other regions the service is offered in. Judging from the US price of subscription, it is likely that the price of Disney+ with ads will be about the same in other regions.
Disney revealed earlier this year that it plans to run about 4 minutes of ads per hour.
Disney+ with ads price disappoints
The new Disney+ with ads price is the same as the old price without ads. That alone does not sound like a particularly good deal for subscribers who have hoped that the ad-powered version of Disney+ would give them a bigger discount.
The $3 price increase for the ad-free version of Disney+ makes the service more expensive than Netflix's basic plan, which is available for $9.99 in the United States. It is still $9 cheaper than Netflix's Premium plan, that is offering Ultra HD streams.
Subscribers from the United States have an edge over subscribers from many other regions Disney streaming services are offered in. Disney announced subscription bundles for customers who want to subscribe to more than one service.
The two basic plans, with ads, give customers access to Disney+ and Hulu for $9.99 per month, and to Disney#, Hulu and ESPN+ for $12.99 per month.
Disney is not the only streaming provider that announced price increases in the past couple of months. Amazon announced that it plans to increase the price of Amazon Prime in several European countries.
My advise that I published back then still stands: subscribe to one or two months per year only, and not for the entire year. Doing so, you are still able to watch all of the provided content, albeit only during the subscription period. While that may mean a delay before you may watch a show or movie, it saves you a lot of money.
Now You: what is your take on the ad-powered subscription plans? Will you make use of them?
Why not make use of the mplayer.conf?
Huh, I have never even seen this “font cache” pane; videos play at once for me, using VLC & XP SP3.
Mike, in theory this should have only been displayed once to you, at the very first video that you played with VLC. The time this window is displayed depends largely on the number of fonts in your font directory.
huh, I lucked out for a change?? Amazing!!
Apparently VLC keeps this info through version updates, but I didn’t see this message after a fresh OS install about 8 weeks ago, & a new VLC.
yes, yes, i have the same problem. sometimes, VLC crashes when it is playing .mov file.
Error:
Buidling font Cache pop-up
Solution:
Open VLC player.
On Menu Bar:
Tools
Preferences
(at bottom – left side)
Show settings — ALL
Open: Video
Click: Subtitles/OSD (This is now highlited, not opened)
Text rendering module – change this to “Dummy font renderer function”
Save
Exit
Re-open – done.
Progam will no longer look outside self for fonts
Source – WorthyTricks.co.cc
Great tip, thanks a lot Kishore.
@Kishore, I’ll try your tips, but does this mean it will no longer show subtitles either?
I do use subtitles, but the fontcache dialog box pops up (almost) everytime I play a file.
Could this be related to the fonts I have installed? Or if I add/remove fonts to my system?
I’ll try to do a fresh install also, if your tips does no work. I’ll post back here later…
/thanks
/j
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,
@ Javier, The trick i posted will show up subtitles too. If not,Dont worry, VLC is currently sorting out this issue and the next version will be out soon.
No probs @ Martin !! Its my pleasure
Try running LC with administrator privileges. That seemed to fix it for me
I am using SMplayer 0.8.6 (64-bit) (Portable Edition) on Windows 7 x64. Even with the -nofontconfig parameter in place SMplayer still scans the fonts. Also, I have enabled normal subtitles and it is still scanning fonts before playing a video. Also, it does this every time the player opens a video after a system restart (only the fist video played).
Does that mean that only instrumental versions of songs will be available for non-paying users?