Big changes are coming to Disney Plus in the UK, and not a single subscriber will get to the end of the year without feeling some sort of change for them, whether it be during your videos or on your wallet.
Firstly, Disney is set to follow Netflix by introducing an ad-supported Disney Plus tier on Wednesday, November 1. This Standard with Ads tier will cost £4.99 per month, down from the £7.99 monthly cost for the ad-free plan, though with no annual equivalent like the £79.90-per-year option currently available for Standard..
In the US, Disney Plus has had an ad-enabled tier since December 2022, and has over 3 million subscribers according to Disney CEO Bob Iger.
Disney Plus' ads plan is, on paper, pretty similar to Netflix's, in that you get 30-45 seconds of ads per hour. US users have reported things that also happen with Netflix's ads plan though, in that you often get a lot less than this, but they sometimes come at weird times in a video. Unlike the Netflix version, all of Disney Plus' videos are included in the plan.
If you're on the current Disney Plus plan, you won't automatically get ads, unless you opt into the new option.
However, if you're trying to pick between the £4.99 per month ad-enabled plan or the £7.99 Standard, a new option is rising, in the form of a £10.99-per-month or £109.99-per-year Premium plan.
This has no ads, lets you stream on four screens at once and is now the only plan to offer 4K resolutions on certain movies and shows, meaning that Standard subscribers will lose access to this high-res viewing. It'll launch when the Standard with Ads tier does
That's not as dramatic a price increase as in the US, where the ad-free Disney Plus plan is currently getting its second price rise in a year, and will soon cost $13.99 monthly (it cost $7.99 for ad-free until December 2022, and $10.99 from then until now).
Disney Plus is one of the many streaming services currently going through a sea change, as companies around the world struggle to make their video-on-demand services profitable. Many platforms like Peacock, Max, Netflix and Disney Plus are famously unprofitable, with their owners increasing subscription prices and reducing the number of originals in order to turn fortunes around.
Within Disney, that'll likely end in fewer TV shows. Bob Iger recently admitted in an interview that its huge number of Marvel TV shows "diluted focus and attention" away from the movies, hinting at a reduced focus on the small screen going forward.
Coming soon to Disney Plus are TV shows like Star Wars' Ahsoka, Marvel's Ironheart and a few returning shows like Loki season 2, What If? season 2 and Andor season 2, but its slate is clearer of big-franchise fare than it has been for a while. That may be little consolation for people who are wondering whether to continue subscribing, but with such a large library of existing and classic movies and TV shows, there will still be thousands of hours' worth of things to enjoy anyway.
