Disney+ cancellation page crashes as customers rush to quit (opens in new tab)

To be fair to the executives. The main regulator that could essentially issue the corporate death penalty, the FCC chairman that can revoke their license to operate, literally said “we can do this the easy way or the hard way”. That’s a Dirty Harry or goodfellas quote. So much for “government shouldn’t pick winners and losers in the economy”.

It's more that ABC/Disney is beholden to two right-leaning broadcasters who are colluding with threats to assist in their prohibited merger that will be approved now because they just gave the felon a successful hand job. There is no indication that the ABC execs are anything more than spineless, unprincipled cowards who cave in a light breeze.

I think most commenters are missing that a local broadcaster monopoly used their own freedom of association to drop the show

The FCC and Trump merely dogpiled on this

For Disney, they need to court the broadcaster monopoly as a key stakeholder to their revenue, this is all private sector and not a constitutional issue

But when Disney is getting kicked and then an expensive fight with the government looms while their revenue is already threatened and would be expensive to resolve with the government , they buckled

Thats the calculus here

but because they buckled, now their customers are using their own freedom of association to disassociate, hampering Disney’s revenue more from that angle

Press F to Pay Respects

Unless everyone at the top has been fired, ABC and Disney are not remotely aligned with the president. A short while ago, they were boycotted by the right for their slanted debate hosting and woke children’s programming.

The FCC chair threatening your broadcast license is a pretty good "excuse". There wasn't a public outcry, it was a government outcry along with threats along multiple lines of leverage.

having experience with a dictatorship first hand, all a censor does is veto milquetoast stuff.

> networks know they need to pivot somewhere.

Please don't say the pivot is podcasts.

>It was all milquetoast,

???

It was a very obvious dig at the president. There's still not good justification for the government to step in, but claiming it's "milquetoast" is baffling.

So when a talk show host vaguely on the left implies something that might not be true it is ground enough to disregard the fucking first amendment and use the power of the state to censor him. But when the entire GOP, including the president, all fabricate obvious lies about the shooter being successively trans, then antifa and then a radical leftist, it's fine. The double standards are fucking crazy.

You don't exactly need to be MAGA to think that Kimmel's remarks were incorrect. From the economist:

>After the assassination Jimmy Kimmel, a comedian on abc, suggested erroneously that Kirk had been killed by a maga fan. Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadcasters, threatened consequences: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within hours abc took Mr Kimmel off the air indefinitely. Mr Carr then said all broadcasters should ease up on the “progressive foie gras”.

https://archive.is/ze4pD

You can check the other articles in the same issue and see they're not exactly cheerleaders for the Trump administration.

That said, the FTC shouldn't be in the business of strongarming critics, even if they're wrong.

ummm First amendment? Its not the first time misinformation has been broadcasted on air, why does the FCC need to get involved in this one. Would they have gotten involved if the implication was that he was a liberal?

Not so much offensive, as utterly puzzling given the information we had on him by Monday night.

Not a fan of Trump or Jimmy, and I don’t think this is a proportional or good response. I’m pretty stunned that there was actually momentum enough to take him off the air. I also don’t understand why he left that little dig in his monologue.

As opposed to the implication that Robinson is somehow a leftwing activist, confidently claimed by every GOP politician from coast to coast?

Also, even if it were, as you say, "misinformation", that is now somehow taboo on television? A sacred line none must dare cross?

He did not say that the kid was MAGA, or at least not exactly. Here’s all he said about it:

> We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

> In between the finger pointing there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half-staff, which got some criticism, but on a human level you can see how hard the President is taking this.

He then played a clip where a reporter asked Trump how he was doing. Trump said good and immediately started talking about his new ballroom.

What about any of that is misinformation? Given how they were certain the shooter was trans because he used arrows on the bullet - which were helldiver 2 codes - it did seem like people were trying to make it seem like the kid wasn’t MAGA.

Turns out the kid is neither, or both, and was just terminally online, which none of us want to admit is the real problem because we’re all also terminally online.

I appreciate this peek behind the curtain but don't share your cheer that humans being involved in the process somehow means it should get the benefit of the doubt when things like this happen.

As you acquire properties, it's almost never possible to rebuild the systems from scratch, and instead it's becomes layers upon layers of patches and quick fixes.

A fun one lately has been AT&T. We have streaming with DirecTV, and they of course share authentication with the parent AT&T. So whenever I try to login to AT&T's website to manage my wireless or fiber, it redirects and logs me into DirecTV, everytime. The only way I can manage my service is to use AT&T's mobile app.

> Since the unsubscribe flows are never going to be anyone's top priority, this things happen.

This in itself makes the situation intentional.

Hulu had some major problems during the broadcast of the Oscars so I was surprised but not surprised to hear about the issues with this.

>Disney's internal systems for something like this are a hodgepodge of the Hulu, D+/Bamtech, old corporate disney, and some bits sent out to SaaS. There's been multiple layers of layoffs and service ownership changes since the pandemic. I don't think the org would be able to rate limit by faking crashes if it tried.

Finance bros and execs love M&A because they can hire a consultant to do all the hard work and get a nice paycheck yet they really suck for the little people and those trying to keep the lights on. Good luck out there.

Maybe one day we'll figure out this anti-trust thing.

“Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence”

It can be a mixture of both. It's extremely easy to Cover Your Ass while intentionally dragging your feet when a bug works in your favor. The manager simply has to decide that other tasks are higher priority.

I've often advocated for inverting Hanlon's razor whenever money is involved. The more money is at stake, the more likely it is in fact due to malice.

That’s the trick with capacity planning around cancellation. You can always deprioritize it because any improvement increases the speed with which revenue decreases (not valuable to the business) and customer satisfaction with this flow generally doesn’t matter since you’re losing their business. The only negative risk factor is CC chargebacks which will cost you some money but at scale most people generally don’t deal with that hassle vs just trying to cancel a few times.

These protest boycotts never last very long. There are many large brand names that have been boycotted over the years and they are all still in business and mostly bigger than ever.

I believe Disney has been subjected to several.

Bravo sir, bravo.

Give them a break, they're living in the future without DST.

I think they'd much prefer people not watch than see people enjoying the content without giving them money (often while seeding the shows to other people in the process).

If nobody watches the shows they can blame the content. If everyone clearly loves the content but refuses to give ABC/Disney/ESPN/FX their business it means the company is the problem (although that wont stop them from falling back on the lie that piracy is all about greedy people who just want everything for free)

As long as there’s a tpb mirror in the working half the point stands.

I actually have ProtonVPN works fine. But if that's problem for you:

1. You can use VPN only when you need to use it.

2. "split tunnening" You can configure VPN to be used only for some programs, like those you use torrenting programs.

3. You can build your own mini-PC/RasPi "TV box" with VPN, storage for programming, connected to television. I wonder if there is not already ready software package for that.

Popcorn time still exists and works. Latest commit was two days ago. Torrent sites still exist too.

Target is still hurting from their DEI roll back. 4% drop in sales 20% drop in net income. That was more niche than an attack on our 1st amendment right.