Disney is raking its customers over the coals with a 75% price hike for their annual subscription (originally $80.) People wonder why piracy is on the rise.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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The lowest common denominators dictate the market, Netflix has best sales in recent years for hiking and consumers couldn't live without it and now Disney is wanting a taste, and I'd imagine it'll work out well for them.
Disney especially has all but totally captured their target demographics, and not many working parents are likely to put the time into setting up a Plex and torrenting movies for their kid(s). Sadly, it's easier to shell over an unreasonably large fee, and let their kids have at it.
I really don't think $11.67 a month counts as an unreasonably large fee.
Death by a thousand cuts though. I had to sit a co-worker down and go over his finances because he never learnt at home or school. The amount of €10-25 monthly subscriptions this guy had meant he spent about €500 per month on those. On top of buying everything on payments because he never has any savings.
It's another example of making use of the flawed human psyche which can't keep track of the little things.
It's unreasonable in the context that while streaming services were intended to be an affordable alternative to cable without sacrificing content variety, having the same level of variety now requires four or five subscriptions. Not an issue unique to Disney, but they and other movie studios have hiked movie rental costs, along with maintaining unreasonable pricing for BluRay releases, as a means of inflating the valuation of their IP catalog.
The fact that — in contrast to having four or five subscriptions over the span of two years— it's economical to run one's own 16TB or 32TB capacity media server (and even subsequently pay for replacement hard drives as needed) demonstrates that the subscription platforms, able to run such servers far more economically per user than anyone can do themselves, are retaining excessively high profit margins in contrast to the compensation paid to the people actually involved in producing content.
I don't think you can fault streaming services for people not properly managing their finances. That's more on the public schools not actually teaching any helpful life skills.