Disney is adding TikTok influencer videos on its streaming platform, the enshittification continues

Remember those early days of streaming? For a certain type of viewer, it was utopia.

It was like someone ingested your most discerning friend’s DVD collection of the best TV shows and movies and organised it into one relatively easy-to-use platform that can call up whatever you fancy with a couple of clicks — and it was legal and cheap.

What sorcery is this! Geez, humans are so clever.

Netflix, then a DVD rental company, moved into streaming almost two decades ago, and started debuting its own original programming in 2012. It didn’t launch here until 2015 and had been beaten by local services Stan and the now-defunct Presto, although many enterprising Australians had already been sneaking into Netflix’s American platform for some years.

Back then — here comes the nostalgia — it was truly a premium environment. Australians were never enthusiastic adopters of pay TV before then, hitting a ceiling of 30 per cent penetration, so for a large majority of the population, streaming was their first taste of an alternative to the rigidity of free-to-air.

What you want to watch (mostly), when you want to watch it. No ads. No promos. No noisy reality TV shows or sports. No interruptions. Considered curation. There was the one main streamer and maybe a secondary service, and combined it didn’t cost you more than $20 a month.

All the streaming enthusiasts were sitting pretty in a space where they could laugh at those fools still paying Foxtel $120 a month, and feel smugly superior to all those naughty pirates.

A decade on, things are vastly different.

There are close to two dozen different streaming platforms, a mix of majors and niche services.

The average Australian household in 2025 subscribed to 3.7 paid services including music platforms, according to Deloitte, and spent $78 a month. That’s quite a bit more than we were paying, even accounting for inflation.

Most of the big brands now have ads all over it, they’re littered with reality TV shows, sports, podcast videos and, now, social media influencers.

It’s the enshittification of streaming — and we’re paying more for the privilege of an increasingly garbage experience.

The latest shift is today Disney announced it had signed a deal with TikTok to include social media influencer videos on its streaming platform, Disney+.

The way it works is that Disney has agreed to licence the use of its intellectual property to some influencers, or as they like to call themselves “creators” who will make fan videos without infringing on copyright, and in turn, Disney will showcase them on its streaming platform.

The benefit for Disney seems obvious, and it still gets to control who has access to its characters, and which videos — only the most flattering and “on-brand” ones, surely — will get a run.

But for viewers who want to retain that premium streaming experience, it’s another encroachment of the online content industrial complex.

Streaming platforms were supposed to be a walled garden, a sanctuary from all those shouty 30-second dance, skit or nothing videos that are increasingly training people into shorter attention spans.

Disney, of course, had its own PR spin on it. “The best storytellers are fans first. That has always been true at Disney, and today, fans are celebrating our stories in entirely new ways,” its chief marketing and brand officer Asad Ayaz said in a statement.

“This collaboration creates a bridge between the stories we tell and the creativity they inspire, giving creators a bigger stage to share what they’ve made, and audiences more to discover on Disney+ every day.”

The TikTok partnership will only roll out in the US for now, on the Verts tab on its mobile app, which is not yet active in Australia. But it plans to expand these user-created videos around the world after the test phase.

Will Disney look back at this moment at some point and go, oh, this is when we let the invaders in, and devalued our 100-year history of longform storytelling?

When you sit these influencer videos alongside Oscar winners such as Nomadland (a film produced by Disney’s Searchlight banner), do you not declare that this amateur work has the same if not similar artistic value?

Perhaps if there was a way to truly customise streaming homescreens so that you can excise what you don’t want to see, but there isn’t. No matter how much we’re led to believe that the algorithm is catered to you, you can never escape the promo tiles for My Cat from Hell and Outback Opal Hunters (here’s looking at you, HBO Max).

There’s a reason why the House of Mouse did this, just as there was for its now aborted agreement with OpenAI earlier in the year.

Platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and, most significantly, YouTube is increasingly taking share-of-viewing time away from Disney, Netflix, Prime and the like.

It’s not that they’re trying to become YouTube before YouTube becomes them — that ship has sailed. YouTube is already bigger than all the streamers in the US when it comes to engagement time on the largest screen, the home TV.

The streamers are panicking. It’s why Netflix introduced video podcasts on its platform earlier this year, but excluded the viewing numbers from its half-year data dump.

Considering how much streaming has changed our viewing habits, it’s extraordinary to think that it’s really only been around, in Australia, for a decade. Disney+ and Apple TV launched just before the pandemic, and HBO Max is even newer, but the form has become the byword for at-home entertainment.

But so much has changed in that short span of time, and largely in response to business reasons, rather than audience desires.

You might think that people’s appetite for entertainment can never be satiated, but the more voracious monster is the investment and finance community who adheres to the philosophy of more, more, more returns.

There are few markets that haven’t reached saturation levels when it comes to streaming, and the opportunities for massive growth have petered out. That’s why ads came in, that’s why password sharing crackdowns happened, that’s why your homescreen is jammed with mess.

No viewer actually wanted ads to be ubiquitous on streaming. The companies frame it as “consumer choice” because it created a cheapest level of subscription for price-conscious members.

But it only seems cheaper because all the other subscription tiers have been regularly jacked up over the years.

When Netflix launched in early 2015, its cheapest tier was $8.99 and its higher ones with more screens or 4K definition were $11.99 and $14.99. The $8.99 option still remains but that’s the one with ads, and its higher tiers cost almost double at $20.99 and $28.99.

Disney launched in 2019 with a single price point of $8.99 a month or $89.99 a year. Now its cheapest option, with ads, is $9.99, with the higher tiers priced at $17.99 a month or $179.00 a year and $24.99 a month or $249.99 a year.

Paramount+, HBO Max, Stan and Binge all have ad tiers, as does Prime Video (a surcharge of $2.99 a month to avoid commercials), but that one is structured trickily enough that the ACCC is suing them over alleged unfair contract terms.

Technically, you are paying more for more — but is it the kind of “more” you actually want?

What if you don’t actually want sports? Disney added ESPN onto its platform in March 2025, and increased its prices a month earlier. There was never the option to go, “no thanks, I don’t want to pay for that extra content”.

And what if you have no interest in video podcasts, or trashy reality TV shows such as Members Only Palm Beach or Love is Blind? Or influencer TikToks? Trying to be everything to everyone is what leads to the dilution of quality.

What happened to that curated premium environment of the best of the best? If you want short-form influencer videos, that’s what social media is for.

Like all things in our culture, enshittification came for streaming and it’s not letting go.