Disney Plus — Blog

Goodbye, Apple TV+

Yesterday Apple announced a price increase on its services. Primary to my concern is the $2.00 increase to Apple TV+, now costing $6.99. That impelled me to cancel my subscription. At least the company makes it easy to cancel! I did it right on my iPhone via the Apple ID settings. Shame on companies like The New York Times forcing you to make a phone call. Just so the minimum wage agent on the other side of the line can try their best to convince you to stay. No, thanks. My decision is absolute.

Apple TV+ at $4.99 is apparently low enough of a price for me to keep my subscription long after I finished watching the show that made me sign up in the first place: Pachinko. Since then, I did not launch the app even once to watch another thing. Great shows like Succession and Ted Lasso that everyone rave about? I could not care less. I simply do not watch TV shows. The latest Marvel and Star Wars stuff on Disney+ I’ve yet to start. The impetus is not immediately there.

The price for these subscription services only ever goes upward. Apple did me a favor by reminding me I’m still paying for Apple+. $6.99 for something I don’t use is too much. I don’t even share that account with my friends, which I absolutely do with Disney+. Accounting sharing is how I am able to watch stuff on all the major streaming platforms for the price of one or two. Though to be perfectly fair, Verizon wireless pays for my Disney+ subscription (and Hulu, and ESPN+). The friend who is paying nearly 20 bucks a month for HBO Max is the real MVP.

Not that I watch a lot of stuff on HBO (not a single hour of Game of Thrones). If I were on my own, I’m not sure I would subscribe to even one of the streaming services. If anything, I would pay for Youtube Premium, a platform I watch videos on every single day.

Quick thoughts on Disney Plus

The much-anticipated streaming platform from the House of Mouse - Disney Plus - finally launched yesterday, and as expected from the biggest entertainment company on the planet, the interface is slick, and playback is super smooth. There’s no hiccups to speak of so far from my perspective (it worked perfectly with Chromecast), though from what i can gather on twitter, other folks are experiencing momentary hang-ups and unresponsiveness due to the sheer demand for Disney Plus.

I guess even the biggest entertainment company on the planet can’t stress-test its platform properly before a launch.

Due to it being a normal work-day yesterday, I haven’t had the time to really delve into the enormous amount of content on Disney Plus. It’s wild to see the entire back catalogue of The Simpson - 30 seasons of it - available to stream; imagine binge-watching through all of it - surely whatever life you previously had will no longer exist. The complete seven seasons of Boy Meets World - the seminal sitcom of my childhood - is also available, which means i can finally delete my downloaded bootlegs (surely the statute of limitations have expired by now).

Similar to what MP3 did for music, it seems people are entirely willing to trade visual quality in return for convenience and ease of use when it comes to streaming. I for one can dig the minimalism of having one device to access all the TV shows and movies there is to offer, even if a high bitrate blu-ray version does look magnitudes better on a properly setup 4K TV screen. Indeed, the quality of streaming is “good enough”, much like how MP3 sound quality is good enough to forgo the hassle of swapping CDs for every album you want to listen.

And also like music, the future of television (and maybe even movies) is streaming, though I wonder how our respective internet service providers feel about the immense amount of bandwidth it’s increasingly using - especially once most of the content switches over to 4K resolution. I have a monthly soft-cap of 1 terabyte with Comcast, so that’s going to be a problem down the road because it streaming 4K for one hour requires 7 GB of data. Hopefully Comcast will make the consumer-friendly move and get rid of data caps altogether, but then again, this is Comcast we’re talking about.

Late last night I watched the first episode of The Mandalorian, the Star Wars series that’s headlining the Disney Plus launch. Not having watched any Game of Thrones, it is my first exposure to this new generation of TV shows with production budgets equal to major studio films. It’s quite amazing to see such quality and scale on the television screen, and The Mandalorian is rather impressive so far. The upcoming Marvel shows have movie-like big budgets as well, and it seems the defining line between television shows and theatrical films is quickly blurring.

Exciting times. I’ve subscribed to other streaming platforms before, but it looks like Disney Plus has and will have the goods to keep me hooked for a long time.