Disney, in its infinite benevolence, is offering customers a chance to put a more specific price on the precious time remaining in their lives in the coming months, announcing that it’s raising the cost for it subscription streaming service Disney+ this December—while also introducing an ad-supported tier operating at the current price of $7.99 a month.
Dubbed Disney+ Basic—as in, “we’re basically going to get more revenue out of you here one way or the other”—the ad-supported plan would reportedly launch with a requirement of making users consume four minutes of ad time per hour of content watched. (Initially in half-minute or minute-long slots, although it sounds like they have some ambitious plans for expanding their offerings out.) Meanwhile, if you’d like to stay out of ad-land, you’ll need to up your monthly price to $10.99 a month, which will knock you up into Disney+ Premium.
(To be clear: You already have Disney+ Premium, which is just what they’re calling the ad-free version of the service; you’re just going to be asked to pay more money for it.)
Both of these “new” plans will launch simultaneously, on December 8 of this year. (Also: Hulu’s getting its own hikes in October, up by a dollar—to $8.99—for its own ad-supported tier, and jumping from $12.99 to $14.99 for the ad-free version.)
For comparison’s sake, the new Premium version of Disney+ will now shoot up to being the fifth-most expensive streaming plan on the market, behind, obviously the new Hulu, which will be tied with HBO Max, plus Netflix’s Standard ($15.49) and Premium ($19.99) plans.
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News of the price increases comes as The Money People focus increasing scrutiny on the actual profitability of the streaming boom, in the wake of Netflix posting subscriber losses earlier this year; most of these services launched with the understanding that they’d be money losers for at least their first few years in operation, but that period of leniency might definitely be on the wane.