Now. Just like when food companies sells the same package as before (or a slightly bigger version) as "now with 20% free product!" and after a few months, they remove the free product discount. Price increased, less people noticed it.
> The Dow giant still expects Disney+ to be profitable in 2024.
Disney+ isn’t profitable once you take into account “transfer payments”. They may not be profitable at all yet. But they specifically mentioned being profitable including transfer payments.
That basically means that when Disney movie studios use to sell streaming rights to another company - say Netflix. They may make for instance $500 million (made up number). Disney+ still “pays” the Disney movie studio $500 million. It’s counted against Disney+ profits. Of course the Disney company as a whole keeps most of that money. But it still has to pay part of it to the actors, producers, etc who have a revenue share agreement.
It was a big point of contention when Black Widow was released.
That's text-book financial engineering. I understand the creators' concerns, especially the ones that signed contracts before Disney decided to create Disney+, but on the Disney side I really don't care. It's more, I'm explicitly hostile to it due to the balkanization of streaming platforms now that every big producers start to have their own end-user distribution, subscription-based service.
It’s not “financial engineering”. It’s standard managerial accounting. I’m an MBA drop out and studied this over 20 years ago (undergrad in CS. The dot com boom called my name). In most large organization, different departments are separated into “cost centers”. Managers are often responsible for their own profit and loss. Internal “costs” are assigned to departments working together.
Why should the Disney+ manager get credit for making $450 million in profit by causing Disney Movie Studios to lose $500 million? How is that good for the overall business? Again I’m completely making up numbers.
We had a method to pay one bill and get all of the content you wanted - it was called “cable”.
They're just actually introducing the ads at the current pricing level, and adding a higher "no ads" level. Of course they would have ended up there soon enough anyhow, but they're just doing it immediately.
