Disney Plus is offering an assortment of ‘perks' to keep you from canceling when your favorite show ends
The Walt Disney Company said yesterday that it is rolling out a new 'perks' program for subscribers of its Disney Plus streaming service. The program features 11 benefits that Disney Plus users can take advantage of, so long as they remain a paying subscriber.
Sellers or buyers housing market? Zillow's analysis for 250 metros
Walgreens buyout could change the future of pharmacy care
How to watch the UEFA Champions League Final 2025 live online or on a TV, including free options
But it's likely that Disney isn't offering these benefits out of the goodness of their little mouse heart. Instead, the perks are likely an effort to reduce one of the biggest threats that Disney Plus and all other streaming services face: 'churn.' That's the industry term for when subscribers cancel a service during a specific period.
The Walt Disney Company launched the new perks program yesterday, which is now available to all Disney Plus subscribers in the United States. Disney says the new perks program will be rolling out to other geographic regions later this year.
Upon its launch, the program features 11 perks that subscribers can take advantage of. However, it remains to be seen how compelling the perks will be to the average subscriber, as they appear to be a mixed bag of random free trials, discounts, and contests.
For example, two of the 11 'perks' are for contests. One, if you win, will let you attend the Freakier Friday world premiere in August, while the other gives you a chance to win a free Disney cruise.
In other words, these perks won't be available to every Disney Plus subscriber—merely the chance to win them will be.
The perks are also full of free trials or limited memberships, including a three-month free trial of Clear+, the airport security membership program; a two-month Super Duolingo free trial; and a six-month free DashPass membership—but only if you've never been a DashPass subscriber before.
Random discounts are also available, including 20% off at adidas.com, and 15% off at Funko.com and Loungefly.com. Subscribers can also get lower rates at select Disney resorts.
And then there are digital perks, including free emoji, early access to the digital pin collectable experience, Disney Pinnacle; and free in-game tokens for the Monopoly Go! and Star Wars TIE Fighter games.
The perks are available to all Disney Plus subscribers in the United States, and there is no extra charge for accessing them.
Though Disney did not specifically state that its new 'always-on' perks program was an effort to reduce churn, that's likely what it is designed for.
'Churn' is the industry term that describes subscribers who cancel their streaming subscriptions, often when they've watched all the content they want to see, such as a specific movie or series. Instead of continuing to be an active subscriber to the service, they will cancel it to save money and then only resubscribe when the service has new content they want to watch.
Churn stops Disney and other streaming services from receiving monthly recurring revenue from individuals. Instead of subscribing for the whole year, a subscriber who churns may cancel the service in February and not resubscribe until September, when new content of interest to them becomes available.
This cycle of canceling and resubscribing is very familiar to streaming customers who juggle a lot of services and aim to keep their monthly entertainment costs down. In fact, you might say that easy cancellation was the original 'perk' of the streaming revolution—offering a contrast to the long-term contracts that were so prevalent during the traditional cable TV era.
Disney is apparently hoping that by adding 'always-on' perks, it will reduce subscriber churn, as when the subscription stops, so do the additional perks. But that carrot-style approach will only work if the subscribers find value in the perks to begin with.
Disney announced its new perks program as an 'always-on' one. It went with this branding because this isn't the first time that Disney has offered perks to Disney Plus subscribers. In the past, it has offered time-limited perks, like reduced fares on select Disney Cruise products.
But given that most of the 'always-on' perks are still limited—such as the free trials and contests—it's hard to imagine that most Disney Plus subscribers who are churners will stick around just for the perks, unless they do a lot of shopping at Funko and Addidas and really want those 15% and 20% discounts.
However, it should be noted that Disney says 'new Perks will drop regularly.' The company is also rolling out perks to Hulu subscribers starting in June, which include more contests and nondescript 'exclusive perks' from LG, Microsoft, and Pure Green.
Disney Plus is a significant focus for the Walt Disney Company, as the service is a potentially massive source of recurring income. Therefore, it's no wonder that Disney wants to make it as appealing as possible to retain subscribers and reduce churn.
Recently, signs point to Disney being aware of a possible slowdown in Disney Plus growth. When it reported results for its second-quarter fiscal 2025 in March, Disney said it had 126 million Disney Plus subscribers during the period, up by 1.4 million from the quarter before.
However, the company gave a lukewarm forecast for Disney Plus in the current Q3. Disney said it expects to see only a 'modest increase in Disney+ subscribers' compared to the service's Q2 fiscal 2025 numbers.
This post originally appeared at fastcompany.comSubscribe to get the Fast Company newsletter: http://fastcompany.com/newsletters
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
21 minutes ago
- Washington Post
An astonishing new approach to ‘Frankenstein'
The 'Frankenstein' that roared to life in D.C. this past weekend marks a triumphant U.S. directorial debut for London-based theater savant Emily Burns, who'd already earned a measure of local attention for adapting the script for the 'Macbeth' that brought Ralph Fiennes to Shakespeare Theatre Company last spring. As in that intriguing but uneven exercise, Burns has chucked a night-dark classic and a brisk contemporary vibe into her authorial Cuisinart. But this time, with the writer-director not just remixing the story but shepherding the whole shebang, the resulting world premiere is a blistering success — unabashedly intelligent, sumptuously visualized, taut as an assassin's garrote. It's jump-scary psychodrama with a literary pedigree, served up in sleek prestige-TV style. If there's any theatrical justice it'll end up making piles of money on Broadway and the West End. We're still in Geneva circa 1790, still in Mary Shelley's shadow-shrouded tale of an Enlightenment-inspired wannabe scientist. The moral and ethical probings still circle around what exactly Victor Frankenstein (Nick Westrate) has been up to of late. But there's also the intimately personal question, more urgent now than ever, of what the fallout will be for Elizabeth (Rebecca S'manga Frank), Victor's adopted sister and eventual wife. You might reasonably guess that in a rewrite grounded in what the script says is 'psychologically now,' she'll end up being far more than a tragic second-banana figure. What you might not expect is how far and how firmly Burns will manage to shift focus to Elizabeth without entirely dismissing Victor as 'the real monster,' that tired old oversimplification. Or how much genuinely suffocating suspense she'll wring from the hows and the whys and the what-could-you-possibly-be-thinkings. We'll have none of the novel's epistolary, travelogue-y throat-clearings to kick off this brutally efficient retelling; no Arctic vistas, no random ice floe encounters. Burns launches things in smothering gloom instead, with moody surtitles and a moodier voice-over. (Tired devices, you might sneer, right up until they pay off in a hair-raising collision of remembered horror, real-time revelation and rapacious need.) Those opening atmospherics give way, suddenly and startlingly, to a titanic thunderclap and a strobed glimpse of what looks for an instant like your standard mad-scientist lab setup. (The design elements, courtesy of scenarist Andrew Boyce, costumer Kaye Voyce, lighting guru Neil Austin, sound artist André Pluess and projectionist Elizabeth Barrett, prove uniformly superb and enviably unified.) A quick tonal shift, more light, and we're in the soaring moonlit kitchen of the Frankenstein family's stately home, well past midnight on the stormy eve of the young couple's long-planned wedding. Then Burns's lean story edit derails not just the planned nuptials but everyone's entire lives: Victor's 10-year-old brother, William, reported missing in the opening exchanges, is confirmed dead. Which is when things get all 21st-century head-shrinky: Justine (Anna Takayo), the devoted family retainer framed for the murder in Shelley's version, implicates her own self in this telling, confessing to the crime out of a morbid conviction that her impatience with William's preadolescent rowdiness had driven him out of the house and into the real killer's path. And Justine's piercing need to atone for what she sees as unforgivably bad (surrogate) parenting is merely the first suggestion of the soul-searchings to come over at the Frankenstein place. Victor and Elizabeth and eventually their righteous wet nurse (Takayo again, chameleoning nicely) will dig into memories of childhood alienation, tales of shifting parental affections and confrontations around what being a decent mother even means. Or, crucially, a halfway-decent father. It's all grounded impeccably, both in key themes from the original text and in stark traumas Shelley navigated in real life: Her mother's death was a direct result of her birth, while her own son, not coincidentally named William, was ailing around the time of the novel's conception and dead by the age of 3. The author lost three other children in their infancy, too. No shortage of resonance in all that for this adaptation's explorations of what courage it takes to contemplate the making of a child, how hugely the process of creating life can go awry, how quickly the simplicities of youth can curdle into the monstrosities of adult humanity. Frank's hypnotically sure performance as Elizabeth is the staging's bright lodestar. Her voice is caramel and cloves, expressive even in Burns's lighter modern phrasings, downright beguiling in more lyrical passages taken whole from Shelley's period text. Her body language speaks more resonantly yet: Stillness can equal immense authority onstage, and this actor's economy of movement generates black hole gravity, making larger gestures all the more seismic when they erupt. Takayo's is a nervier and more restless presence, as is Westrate's — aptly enough given the essential fecklessness of this adaptation's still-charming Victor. He's twitchy and shifty and impossible to repose any real faith in, this thoroughly modern man-child, which is one potent way Burns sustains the evening's exquisite narrative tension. Grounding a character's evasions and fictions in a physical vocabulary that screams 'I cannot be trusted' is a sly tactic for making an audience second-guess what it already knows to be a horrifying truth. That truth, of course, involves what constitutes monstrosity, and in whose eyes. Burns's last great coup is the climactic reveal that finally settles the question of whether this tale of a grotesque and murderous villain bears any resemblance to fact. It's not quite a spoiler to acknowledge that a Creature does make an appearance — actor Lucas Iverson gets a playbill credit, after all — but the specifics of that answer and the delicacy in how Burns and company navigate the moment elicited audible gasps at Sunday's matinee. Like nearly every rich and gorgeous element of this 'Frankenstein,' it's flat-out astonishing. Frankenstein, through June 29 at the Klein Theatre. About 2 hours 20 minutes, including an intermission.
Skift
22 minutes ago
- Skift
Travel's Best Paid CEOs: Where They Rank
The pay for a dozen travel company CEOs in the S&P 500 attracted compensation greater than half of their peers in the S&P 500. How does the compensation of travel CEOs compare with peers in the S&P 500? The three highest-compensated CEOs of travel and travel-related companies in 2024 were Glenn Fogel of Booking Holdings ($44.8 million), Bob Iger of Disney ($41.1 million), and Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi ($39.4 million), according to the Wall Street Journal's annual survey of S&P 500 CEO pay. Fogel ranked 16th among all S&P 500 CEOs, Iger was 19th, and Khosrowshahi was 21st — placing all three in the top 25. We included Iger and Khosrowshahi in our list. Although Disney is a media and e
Associated Press
22 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Journalism opens as the Belmont favorite. Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty is the 2nd choice
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) — Kentucky Derby runner-up and Preakness winner Journalism opened as the 8-5 favorite in the Belmont Stakes when post positions were drawn Monday for the final leg of the Triple Crown. Derby winner Sovereignty was set as the second choice on the morning line at odds of 2-1 and drew the No. 2 post. Journalism, near the outside with the No. 7 post, is the only horse running in all three Triple Crown races. 'He's been kind of the same horse since July of last summer,' trainer Michael McCarthy said. 'He does everything you'd ask a good horse to do: He eats well, trains well, acts well. I thought through the last six, seven weeks here, his energy's been the same throughout.' Sovereignty is back after owners and trainer Bill Mott opted to skip the Preakness and run the Belmont on five weeks of rest, and things have gone swimmingly since he arrived at historic Saratoga Race Couse. 'We've been very lucky with everything that's gone on sine he's been here,' Mott said. 'He's been moving well over the track.' Sovereignty and Journalism in the field set up this Belmont, the second at Saratoga while renovations are made to its usual home on Long Island, to be a rematch between the first two Triple Crown winners who were also first and second the Derby. 'He's improved, as I think as many of these horses have,' Mott said of Sovereignty. 'I think this entire group, if you look at their form and the way they've developed over the course of this year, I think they've made steady progress and it should be an interesting race.' No. 6 Baeza, who finished third in Kentucky on the first Saturday in May, opened at 4-1. Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert's Rodriguez, who was scratched from the Derby because of a minor foot bruise and held out of the Preakness, was next at 6-1 and will leave the starting gate from the No. 3 post. The field of eight horses also includes No. 8 Heart of Honor, tied for the longest shot on the board at 30-1 after finishing fifth in the Preakness. New to the Triple Crown trail are No. 1 Hill Road (10-1), No. 5 Crudo (15-1) and No. 4 Uncaged (30-1). Journalism, who was favorited in the Derby and the Preakness and at the moment is the top 3-year-old in the country, looks like the horse to beat. 'Saratoga is very good for horses,' McCarthy said. 'He seems a little bit re-energized up here. We're looking for a wonderful renewal of the Belmont here on Saturday.' ___ AP horse racing:
