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Disney+ has changed the game for streaming services. Investing a lot of money in high-quality original programming, the service hit over 164 million subscribers, and it continues to grow. With that growth, Disney is looking to shake things up, offering a new tier of the service which is ad supported. It’s not actually a money-saving option, however. Disney has raised the price for non-ad supported tiers, and replaced the original low-cost option with this new, ad-supported one. So what is this new ad supported tier, how much does it cost, and what else do you need to know about it?
The Price:
Disney+ with ads costs $8 a month. If you don’t want ads, there is a little bit of a price hike, as the ad-free experience will cost $11 a month. Prior to the launch of Disney+ with ads, the service cost $8 a month, so users who have been paying the same amount for months with their ad-free Disney+ experience will now have to pay extra to avoid the newly-added advertisements. Yes, that is a bummer.
Ad length:
Depending on what you’re going to watch, you’ll have to watch a series of ad breaks. It’s pretty uniform throughout the service. Movies have no more than four ad breaks, even if the movie is Avengers: Endgame. TV shows typically have three ad breaks throughout each episode. For the most part, it’s all separated relatively evenly throughout the piece of content you’re watching.
Each ad break is either 45 seconds or 60 seconds long. Typically, I saw 45 second ad breaks, which consisted of three 15-second ads. At no point were there any ad breaks longer than 60 seconds and the vast majority of the ad blocks were a total of 45 seconds. In total for a TV show episode, you’re watching 2 minutes and 15 seconds of ads to 3 minutes of ads for 30-45 minutes per episode. For a movie, you’re experiencing 3-4 minutes of ads. It’s straightforward, and there’s about half the amount of ads on Disney+ with ads as there is with Netflix with ads.
Types of ads:
Much like Netflix’s ad experience, the types of ads you see on Disney+ aren’t catered to you, as far as I could tell. Throughout the ad blocks I watched, I saw ads for cars, cruise ships, fast food chains, college, eggs, a portable gaming console whose mascot is a mustached plumber, and numerous ads to make sure to talk to your doctor about your child having RSV. It was completely all over the place, which is fine.
Additionally, there was no change in ad content, depending on what I was watching. I saw the same types of ads while watching Home Alone that I did watching Deadpool 2–one of the few rated-R movies on Disney+.
However, with all the ad partners Disney has made–which you can see in the image sent to us in a press release above–we only 12 companies represented. Keep in mind, we say through 15 ad breaks through various shows and movies.
Shows without ads:
While movies typically have four ad breaks, we found that various children’s programming had no ads. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Bluey, Spidey and his Amazing Friends, and other programs aimed strictly at children contained zero ad blocks, not even to open the episodes. However, when you step into the realm of family movies–or movies aimed strictly at children–the ads returned. Sorry, you can’t watch a Muppets movie or any of the various Air Bud spinoffs without learning more about a very famous coffee chain.
Skipping around:
Very quickly, I found out that you can’t just skip around to the next ad block in a show or a movie to simply watch more ads, which sounds sadistic, but it’s my job. This was something I did covering Netflix with ads to speed up the researching process. After a certain amount of time has passed between these ad spots, skipping ahead will trigger an ad block. So because of this, I had to sit through most of Home Alone and parts of Home Alone 2 and 3 to see the full spread of ads–which isn’t a complete loss as Home Alone is a classic.
What I found is that you have a 30-45 second grace period after an ad block to jump around to any point in the movie’s timeline without hitting another ad block–regardless of where you move to. However, being able to skip around without being subjected to ads is a great thing. If you want to jump ahead in a movie you just started playing, you’ll get the opening section of ads, then you’ll be able to move around the timeline freely, right away. If you let the movie play a bit.
During Home Alone 2, at about the 5-minute mark, I jumped ahead past the first ad break, and I got 45-second ad block. 4 minutes after that, I skipped ahead again past that next visual ad block in the timeline and got 45 seconds of ads. I did this one more time, and I got about a minute and a half into the film before the next ad block kicked off. During Home Alone 3, I tested this once again, and the first time I got an ad spot after jumping ahead was after 40 seconds of watch time.
Final thoughts:
If we lived in a world where Disney+ was still $8 a month, the ad-supported version of the streaming service would be a waste of time. However, with the introduction of this tier, Disney has bumped up the price of the service without ads to $11 a month, which is a huge shock at first. However, considering that since the launch of D+ in 2019, the price hasn’t gone up at all, even considering all the original content and growth of the product. What it really comes down to is, “are you OK with ads?” If so, enjoy saying $36 a year on Disney+. If ads bug you in the slightest, you may as well shell out $3 a month for the same exact service.
