Disney has announced that it is increasing the price of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ plans starting on October 12. The ad-free plans are seeing the bulk of the increase, with ad-free Disney+ going from $10.99 to $13.99/month and ad-free Hulu going from $14.99 to $17.99/month. At the same time, Disney has indicated that it will begin cracking down on password sharing next year.
It has only been a year since Disney last increased prices for its streaming services, Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+, yet here we go again. In addition to the price increases for the standalone plans already mentioned, the top-tier bundle that includes ad-free Disney+, ad-free Hulu, and ad-supported ESPN+ is increasing from $19.99 to $24.99/month. Hulu w/ Live TV will increase to $76.99/month with ads and $89.99/month without ads.
Apart from the standalone ad-supported ESPN+ plan, which is increasing from $9.99/month to $10.99/month, none of the other ad-supported plan prices are changing. Disney is also adding a new bundle that includes ad-free Disney+ and ad-free Hulu for $19.99/month, which will be available starting September 6th. See the chart above for a full list of all plans and bundles.
Disney didn’t provide any specifics about when or how it would prevent password sharing, but CEO Bob Iger said they would “get at this issue” in 2024 and called it a top priority. Netflix recently began offering account holders that it detects are sharing passwords with other households the option to pay a little more for both homes to stream from the same account. Disney may go that route or may just block access and require that an entirely new subscription account be created for the secondary home.
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Do we know if the price for the Grandfathered Hulu, Disney+ (No Ads), ESPN+ $14.99 USD/mo is changing?
Glad I stopped subscribing at the last increase. We don’t miss it in the least.
Streaming wars are dead :(! High price$ with all services.
Pirating of video content will likely increase even more thanks to all the price increases. It’s been going up already because of the balkanization of streaming services, making it difficult to even figure out what show is streaming where.
And, as I said, I’m not putting up with commercials like I’m some caveman back in 1995. If I can’t get a reasonable deal for ad free, I can easily go alternate routes.
The new cable TV, folks.
Hulu refusing to offer an annual no-ad deal/plan confounds me. We are in no less than the third decade of the future we were all promised. Sure, flying cars aren’t here, but we have the entirety of human knowledge and navigation available in our pocket on an HD capable video communicator that also makes contactless payments from money direct deposited into accounts from our gig-economy job worked remotely in our pajamas in the Florida Keys. (for now) But ad-free programming is somehow unavailable to consumers willing to pay a market determined rate for an annual plan.
I understand that they feel it is more advantageous to only offer an ad-supported annual plan rather than offer a reasonable ad-free rate that users would be willing to pay.
This is unfortunate.
For them.
I have alternative options that easily fulfill every one of my media inclinations and curiosities. None of them benefit Hulu in the slightest. And I have had for decades. This compellingly indicates that this is unlikely to change in the imminent future.
As I said, this is unfortunate. But not for me.
Nothing indicates that they will, but the streamers in the current competitive environment would be advised to reconsider who the actual customer is. Recent indicators strongly imply that they have miscalculated.
True. But, at least they are now finally offering and ad-free Disney/Hulu bundle. It’s a step in the right direction, anyway.
They just reported a loss of an additional 300k subs and they increase the price by 30%! That’s a recipe for success. NOT!
So glad that we canceled our D+ after what they did to Gina Carano.
Gina did what she did to herself. It’s her problem. Disney is losing subscribers for a lot of reasons, but one of the largest I can see is that you can just binge everything then cancel. Since everything is available forever I could literally sign up once a year for each subscriber for a couple months, watch the series I want to watch, then cancel for a year till a new batch of content is available.
There is just no real incentive for endlessly paying when only so much interests you, there are other services with content you may wish to see, and if you miss something you can watch it anyway whenever you subscribe again.
The business model makes little to no sense.