Last week, we cancelled Disney+. Our annual subscription was due to renew, and at over £100 for the year, we could no longer justify it.
We’ve had a subscription ever since Disney+ launched in the UK, in the early days of lockdown in 2020. In fact, before then we had a subscription to DisneyLife, which was Disney’s UK-only streaming service for video and music, and used to cost £5 per month. Over time, Disney+ has got better, especially now that content from 20th Century Fox is on there.
But we just don’t watch enough of it. When we signed up to Disney+, there was only one price tier at £7.99 per month or £79 per year. Whilst that was more expensive than DisneyLife, there was more content available so it was worth it. Now there are three price tiers, and the most expensive is £10.99 per month, or £109 per year. That’s more than double what we were paying just five years ago. Whilst there is once again a £5 per month tier, it’s with adverts, and we don’t want those.
Like many kids, our eight-year-old seems to just want to watch YouTube Kids now. It’s something we’ve tried to resist for years, but apparently watching home-made videos and Minecraft walk-throughs is far more interesting than the professionally-produced content that we were paying for. We’ll keep paying for Netflix, as you can download content onto an iPad to watch offline. We tend to clip our eight-year-old’s iPad into a stand fixed to the back of the front passenger seat for long car journeys.
We’ve had Amazon Prime in the past, shared using Amazon Household with another family member, but we don’t have this now. Again, it’s getting more expensive, and we’d rather avoid the adverts. And whilst we’ve had free trials of Apple TV+ and Now TV, we’ve never paid for these beyond the trial period. We also don’t pay for a TV package, and just have Freeview and Freesat for live television.
I guess we’ll just re-subscribe to these from time-to-time when there’s something we actually want to watch.
I do find it odd comparing streaming video with streaming music. There’s a handful of music streaming services – Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and so forth – and for the most part, they all have the same music. Yet with streaming video services, most shows are on one or two at best, and many or exclusive to one service.