Disney did not immediately respond The edge‘s request for comment on whether it actually plans to disallow ad-supported users from viewing content with Apple’s or system. The code seems quite unambiguous; it’s a tooltip that says “Groupwatch and Shareplay are not available for ad tier accounts.” However, it could always be a placeholder or a decision that Disney will roll back before the plan actually launches in December.
If Disney actually takes SharePlay and GroupWatch to its non-ad-supported levels, it wouldn’t be the only one to strip features from its cheaper plan. While Netflix doesn’t support SharePlay in the first place, it announced that the most basic plan won’t let you watch your downloaded content offline. It will also be limited to 720p and won’t have all of the content available to regular Netflix subscribers, though the company does say it’s working on the latter.