I strongly agree, and it frustrates me when people and companies claim that advertising their own products "doesn't count." I cancelled my YouTube Premium plan because of ads. These are all the ads they permit on Premium, despite advertising everywhere that Premium removes all ads:

* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.

* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.

* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.

* Email advertisements for Google products and services.

* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.

I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.

> Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not?

You are implying something false. That he’s suggesting thats not an ad. Hes not suggesting that at all.

What he’s suggesting is that that’s very different from Disney gating or interspersing movies with ads. Which it is.

I’ve been a paying customer of Dropbox’s consumer plan for over a decade. Each time I visit their website I am greeted with a full page modal ad asking me to upgrade to a different plan I have no use for.

I’ve dismissed it every time. I don’t mind being shown that ad once. But it bothers me that they don’t care enough about my experience using their product to provide a “never show this again” option.

Or just use some metrics to know that if I dismiss it 50 times then maybe I’m not interested.

I get super bent out of shape when Apple TV+ advertises shows before the one I am trying to watch; even sometimes advertising the show that I am trying to watch itself and spoiling things.

I have actually cancelled my subscription because of this.

I agree. I noticed recently an ad directly inside of 1Password. I’ve paid for a 1Password subscription since 2013, and have had a family plan for many years. I know the company changed hands several years back after AgileBits sold to VC, but this type of disrespect caused me to cancel my membership. There are plenty of alternatives that haven’t turned their focus to the “Enterprise” and aren’t trying to extract as much money as possible from their paying customers.

I grew up with the Disney channel on cable as a kid in the 90s. Disney channel at that time was ad-free except for cross-promotions for other Disney channel shows, most of which I (as a kid who liked the Disney channel) wanted to know more about. I have HBO Now/max/go/whatever and before most shows there’s a skippable promo for HBO stuff. So yeah, I don’t think this is new and Disney+ as it is now is way more ad-free than either of those, so I’m not surprised they are trying to nudge the status quo back to a historical equilibrium; it’s just what these companies do

I’ll always pay more to see fewer ads. My kids see far, far, far fewer ads than I and my peers did growing up watching linear TV in the 90s and I’m going to keep it that way. If Disney+ gets in the way of that I’ll stop paying them and stop using their service, easy as that.

The BBC in the UK makes a great play of having "no ads" but 6Music (their indie music station) has constant cross-promotions interrupting the music, sometimes for jarring TV murder shows. Cross-promotion is just as annoying as ads for insurance, I hate it!

Yeah, those kinds of ads are always aggravating to me because you’re not even making money by showing them to me. They feel like a display of power more than anything else.

Yes I see those, and adverts for other services (watch this program etc) as adverts.

I don’t see adverts embedded in content as adverts. Be sure I’m watching the World Cup on bbc and see an advert on the players shirt doesn’t mean I want my money back, I’d rather we had no adverts, but it’s not unreasonable.

If I use service X I am MUCH less annoyed by an advertisement of subservice X.Y than I am by an advertisement of Nord VPN and Raid Shadow Legends.

> Does anyone not?

People turned a blind eye to Apple advertising it's own services in it's products for years. I saw people defend here, on HN. So, while yes, it's advertising, Disney is far from the first to do this.

I'm not saying it's right, only that people who claim to be opposed to ads are accepting of the type of ads we are discussing.

> if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?

I'm assuming they aren't showing you ads for the plan you are on.

An add, but no more than catching a glimps of a restaurant long after one has ordered. When standing in a shop it is normal to see prices for other products on offer.

One of the most egregious examples of this that's happened to me was with the DVD set of the second or third season of Mad Men. One of the unskippable pre-menu ads was for the next season.

And I didn't know what to say. Either I like the series and I'm going to buy the next season or I don't and I won't.

I may be an outlier but I don't really mind being shown a relatively short ad before watching something. I'm almost never really paying attention yet anyways. Like yes, I'd prefer it not to exist but it doesn't cause me to get into a fit of rage.

But ads in the middle of something I'm watching? Fuck right off with that.

Your link doesn't appear to work for me.

In case folks aren't aware, Disney tried to avoid an allergy-related wrongful death lawsuit from a restaurant at Disney Springs (large publicly available outdoor mall that doesn't even require tickets) because a couple had a Disney+ streaming trial:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jl0ekjr0go

I feel like they stopped doing that, but there was definitively ads for other movies and shows because some movies on Disney+, but I haven't seen it in a while. It was pretty badly done, because you'd get confused and assume you'd started the wrong movie, so maybe they rolled it back?

The quoted text is identical to what I have received in an email from Disney+. I only tend to get a month at a time when I want to watch a given show, but if paying doesn't remove adverts, I'm not going to pay.

> Ads embedded on the playing field? Sure. Billboards visible or sponsor logos on uniforms?

To be honest if I'm paying for no ads I'd be expect to have an option to blur that crap on inpaint it with AI.

Monitors and TVs should have this option.

No, there's nothing really to do. They aren't producing the feed, they're essentially hosting a stream from another broadcaster.

For instance, if you have Paramount+, you can watch sports broadcast by your local CBS station through it. That station is going to be running commercials, Paramount+ has no input on it. The most they can do is run ads over their ads.

I'm assuming there's something similar with Disney+. You can watch your local ABC broadcast or ESPN broadcast of a game, but you're just getting that broadcast as being currently aired.

But even for broadcasts wholly owned and controlled by a streaming platform, like Thursday Night Football on Prime, there are just times when it would be dead air. I don't entirely mind commercials in that instance. Nothing else is going on.

I read it more as a contract issue rather than a technical issue

They mailed me too, and I did read it in full. There's a link right there in the e-mail. I read it, and understood it's not at all what everyone here is claiming.

They could. They won't, because those ads are probably - if you excuse a little Claudish - the load-bearing part of the contract that allows them to show the content in the first place.

(More cynical take: the ads are the whole point, the content itself is just a vector to get those ads in front of people, and prime them to be receptive.)

If you're talking about sports stuff:

1. Now you just have a blank screen. Sure some people might like that but others will think there's an issue with the stream.

2. They're purchasing the rights to show the sports stuff, not actually producing it themselves and removing the ads would make the cost of the rights astronomical.

Even when expensive linear TV packages were the norm, they still came with ads. With live TV paying has never negated the need for ads.

That's why I don't really care that much about terms and conditions. Just because they say they can doesn't mean that they will, conversely, the writing can be misleading to anyone who isn't a specialized lawyer, so most people can't really tell what the terms and condition let them do anyways.

I usually go for reputation and precedent rather then legalese. And in the case of Disney, they had ads in their video tapes and DVDs, so I don't need to read the user agreement to know that it has a good chance to come to Disney+, whatever the legal pathway is.

They don't stop at terms and laws. They stop at what loses money, through customer churn or lawsuits.

Typically the only restraining force is a founder who cares.

It's worse than that. Advertising is a vector for dumping who-knows-what into our minds. Would you let random corporate sponsors put whatever they wanted into your food after you'd already put in the work to choose what you're eating?

To me, my time has value, and my thoughts have more. A party whose goal is to interfere with both, and who actively schemes to interfere with the integrity of both is not merely greedy, they are a hostile actor.

Whereas you would never stoop to exaggeration or your own contribution to this fight since it’s already lost, right?

In most of these cases, you will see a place like D+ carry the same announcers as the TV station. Here Inbet it would be ESPN crews. So having a different, special crew just for ad breaks would not be exactly great. And given the density of ads in, say, the Super Bowl, you would be hard pressed making this a good experience.