Disney Is Considering A Free Disney+ Tier

Subscribe to our Telegram channel for the latest stories and updates.

Disney’s product chief spent two decades at YouTube. Now he’s the guy suggesting Disney+ give some stuff away for free. Adam Smith raised the idea at an internal town hall last week, with no title list and no launch date. Disney hasn’t confirmed anything publicly, and Smith reportedly didn’t say what content would sit outside the paywall.

More and more people are just watching free stuff with ads, like YouTube, Tubi, and The Roku Channel, instead of paying for streaming. Back in 2022, that free-with-ads crowd made up about 12.7% of all TV watching in the US. A year ago it was 16.8%. Now it’s 18.7%. It’s a steady climb and it tends to jump every time a paid service like Netflix or Disney+ raises its price.

Which brings us to Disney+ itself. It launched in 2019 at $6.99 a month. Now, bundled with Hulu, it’s $12.99 a month with ads, or $19.99 if you want it ad-free. Every time that price has gone up, “screw it, I’ll just watch YouTube” has made a little more sense to a few more people.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Apple TV and Paramount+ already let you watch a few full episodes without paying, just to hook you in. That’s not the same as a real free tier, the kind YouTube has, where there’s no credit card, no catch, just free stuff with ads. If Disney actually builds that, it’d be the first big subscription streamer to treat “free” as an actual product, not a taste test before you pay up.

Disney won’t comment, and there’s a big gap between someone floating an idea at a work meeting and that idea becoming a real feature. But everyone’s chasing the same crowd right now.

Disney’s added short vertical clips to its app. So has Paramount+. Netflix is going further, next month it’s bringing in short-form videos from BuzzFeed Studios, Condé Nast, Hearst Magazines, Penske Media, and People Inc, on top of the video podcasts it’s already been pushing this year. Disney’s CEO, Josh D’Amaro, keeps telling staff “product and technology innovation” is the priority, vague enough to mean basically anything, including this.

Disney’s spent three years watching YouTube steal its audience. Then it hired one of the people who built YouTube’s playbook. Now it’s asking whether it’s easier to just join the free-content game everyone else is already winning, instead of keep fighting it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​