[W. Knight]

Meanwhile, they're stopping physical media releases in Australia. Possibly a move to lure more people to the service?
7news.com.au 

Disney to stop releasing DVDs and Blu-ray discs in major change for Australian c…
All your favourite titles will be affected. Here’s what you need to know.
  Source: 7news.com.au

[WillPS]

Meanwhile, they're stopping physical media releases in Australia. Possibly a move to lure more people to the service?
7news.com.au 

Probably also just not as profitable for them to keep going with it. I was amazed when I nipped down the media aisle at my local Asda to see such a range of Disney DVDs, all under £5.

[KatsKaravan]

Disney are also leaving the German-speaking home media market. Releases will continue there but will be outsourced to a local distributor.

[JAS84]

There are tootings that Disney+ is due to introduce a new ad supported tariff which will follow the same sort of arrangement as Netflix.

UK wise, £4.99 with adverts, £7.99 without them (but no 4k) and £10.99 with no ads but 4k/Dolby Atmos.  Existing subscribers will move to the £10.99 package at their next biling date after November 6 unless you intervene otherwise.

www.cordbusters.co.uk 

On a related note there seems to be musings that Disney is in trouble.  Not necessarily financial trouble but recent movie productions have flopped (some major big time) and some stuff does well to break even, Disney+ isn't breaking even and there are ongoing issues with Disney Parks, in particular Disney World Florida.

Yeah, I've even seen rumours about them selling stuff off so that Apple can buy Disney.

[Larry the Loafer]

Probably also just not as profitable for them to keep going with it. I was amazed when I nipped down the media aisle at my local Asda to see such a range of Disney DVDs, all under £5.

Doesn't seem that long ago that the Disney Vault was a thing to keep the value of home video releases high.

[James2001]

I'm pretty sure its just me but coming back to Home Improvement, the earlier seasons as per previous discussion look semi-decent but by the time we get to Season 5 and particularly Season 6 everything's sort of started looking a bit mushy, almost as if the uploads/stream doesn't have enough bandwidth to render it properly, and it looks even more washed out than the earlier seasons do.

Far as I know nothing changed with the production of that show halfway through the run (bar maybe some behind the scenes equipment) and I haven't seen an app update so...?

Slightly connected, but I've just noticed season 1 of Home Improvement showing on Comedy Central Extra. It is properly interlaced, but it's quite an iffy, blurry, smeary NTSC>PAL conversion- quite likely one made back in 1992 when the show was new. Surely they could make a much better one with modern technology (as long as they don't botch it like the current Fresh Prince copies both Sky and the iPlayer are using, which were converted from 60i to 24p then sped up to 25p and are pretty dreadful) rather than just pull 30 year old ones off the shelf.

[Larry the Loafer]

Even watching on CC HD at the moment, the episodes seem much softer than the copies on Disney+.

[LondonViewer]

This is only part of it I think. The streamers are at a point where they have such a hold of the TV market that they can now tap into an incredibly lucrative advertising market that will probably in the long term end up bringing them more revenue than subscriptions alone. Netflix has stuttered a bit with moving people to the ad tier and even filling ad spaces but now they're ditching the basic ad-free tier, and adding more features like being able to use the ad tier on multiple screens, I expect their ad tier will become dominant soon enough. 

Getting subscribers to pay you to watch advertising is basically a win-win for the streamers, as long as the content remains strong enough to keep people subscribing. Not unlike Sky, especially when it was at its peak and people didn't seem to care that their channels were full of ads.

The studios are at a point where they must tap into advertising revenue because the streaming model is no where near as profitable as the model it replaced.

[Medianext.MX]

And now Disney+ is starting the shared password crackdown as it expands its Basic ad-supported tier, starting in Canada:

www.theverge.com 

Disney’s password-sharing crackdown has begun - The Verge
In an email to Canadian subscribers, Disney announced that it’s taking steps to …
  Source: www.theverge.com

[Neil Jones]

Not really sure how effective cracking down on passwords can be.

Any service that requires a password to access is always going to be prone to sharing, legally(!) or otherwise - after all we see it many times on data breaches that usernames and sometimes clear passwords are stuck on the dark web somewhere for anybody savvy enough to see.