Disney To Pull Its Movies From Netflix and Start Its Own Streaming Service (theverge.com) 270
Disney announced today that it will end its distribution deal with Netflix and launch its own streaming service in 2019. "The move is a real blow to Netflix, which secured a valuable streaming deal with Disney back in 2012 -- before streaming had really taken off," reports The Verge. "The deal only kicked into effect last year, so Netflix is barely seeing any benefit here." From the report: Netflix won't lose its Disney movies right away. Disney says it plans to cut Netflix off starting with the studio's 2019 films, and Netflix says it'll be able to keep all the Disney movies it gets through the end of that year. That means Netflix should be able to stream the next two Star Wars movies, but it'll miss out on the new trilogy's final installment. "We continue to do business with the Walt Disney Company on many fronts, including our ongoing deal with Marvel TV," said a spokesperson for Netflix. Disney's streaming service will be built off technology from BAMTech, the MLB-founded video streaming platform. Disney was already a major investor in BAMTech, and today it's making an even bigger investment -- of $1.58 billion -- giving it a 75 percent stake in the company. The acquisition still requires regulatory approval. The Disney-branded streaming service will be the "exclusive home in the U.S. for subscription-video-on-demand viewing," and will kick off with films including Toy Story 4 and the sequel to Frozen. "Original movies, TV shows, [and] short-form content" will be added to the service, and it'll be filled out with older movies from Disney and Pixar's catalog and shows from Disney's TV channels. The report also notes Disney plans to launch a streaming service exclusively for ESPN, targeted for launch early next year. "Disney is promising about '10,000 live regional, national, and international games and events a year,' with individual sports packages available as well," reports The Verge.
Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:5, Insightful)
When do the other movie studios pull their licensing and NetFlix only has original content? And is the Disney service going to be as good or better than the NetFlix experience?
Full Disclaimer: I'm glad Bambi's mom died.
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Hulu 2.0.
Every couple years the distributors try to setup their own streaming company. And every few years said new streaming company goes under because the rights holders make stupid decisions and the streaming doesn't work. Expect it to fail just like all the things before it.
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I suspect he might be correct too. They will make a hash of it by introducing some stupid DRM nonsense, or proprietary codec or something along those lines.
I won't hold my breathe until it is available in my country, because apparently it is better to have fewer customers that to license the rights to stuff all over the world.
america... (Score:3)
Netflix has realised that basically the rest of the world is pretty profitable once you know how to cut down on fraud and keep your library as consistent as possible...
sure as a producer you can get distribution deals with large media companies (e.g. British sky or Australian foxtel ) but do you want one big bang ?
or lots of micro payments and some big ones mixed in.... ?
Disney's approach is american centric and a train wreck of licensing sport from the start... good luck with that I'm sure those BA
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Disney might have the content, but they won't get the user experience right.
How much does a one-day pass to Disney World cost? It's not just the user experience - if it doesn't cost at minimum 2x as much as Netflicks and suck hard, I'll be really surprised. When the only way to watch some of the older Disney movies, Star Wars, and Marvel movies is their platform, they're going to squeeze people soooo hard..... I wouldn't be surprised if the blueray prices got bumped up as well, just to make sure that their streaming service looks a little more enticing.
And now that I think
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:5, Insightful)
I have Netflix.
I have Amazon Prime (not just for video, but lots of stuff for the $).
When I cut the cord, I got Playstation VUE...that covers my "cable" channels, news, sports (I only really like watching college football on ESPNs)....
I also have tivo and antenna for local HD OTA content...no monthly fees there, but just with that and the 3 streaming services I mentioned, it would have to be something VERY compelling for me to add yet another streaming service.
I have more content than I need at this time....WTF would I add Disney? (or any other service out there).
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WTF would I add Disney? (or any other service out there).
Agree - I'm in a similar situation. Luckily my kids don't give a crap about Disney anymore (both late teens). But if you had young kids...
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:4, Interesting)
Disney owns a lot more than cartoons about princesses. As others have noted already, Star Wars and the Marvel movies come to mind. I'm sure your late teens are kind of interested in those (especially if they're boys, though there's no shortage of girls who like action movies either.) They own the distribution rights to many (maybe all?) of the Studio Ghibli movies in the US. And thousands upon thousands of other titles you probably wouldn't even think of as being Disney properties (R-rated movies and the like.)
Disney is huge. If you're wanting to stay legitimate, you'd be losing a large chunk of culture if you avoided them.
Of course what they'll find is that few people are capable of paying for every single distributor's own walled-garden crappy site and all the piracy reduction that trended with the rise of Netflix' online service will start spiking upward again. Not that the media companies will acknowledge the correlation of course (at least not publicly) because why would you need more than just their service and their service is (individually) reasonably priced right?
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This is Hulu 2.0.
Every couple years the distributors try to setup their own streaming company. And every few years said new streaming company goes under because the rights holders make stupid decisions and the streaming doesn't work. Expect it to fail just like all the things before it.
This is how, one by one, we discover the magic of Kodi.
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:5, Insightful)
This is Hulu 2.0.
Every couple years the distributors try to setup their own streaming company. And every few years said new streaming company goes under because the rights holders make stupid decisions and the streaming doesn't work. Expect it to fail just like all the things before it.
As much as I agree with that point, if anyone is going to be able to do it it'll be Disney. They're specialists at pacifying the most unruly consumer group that has ever dared to appear at a Target... Children. All Disney have to do is price themselves at $1 less that the pain threshold of parents with kids.
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And Disney's got the ABC content, and whatever it is they're calling the family channel now (I cut the cord, so I know they changed it, but can't remember to what). They've also got ESPN, which they'll do live sports with the same way HULU's got some live content now.... oh, and Marvel and Star Wars movies. Oh well. I would rather live without than to subscribe to a separate Disney service.
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I plead ignorance. I blame Netflix for most of the fragmentation, for going original and teaching the originators, like HBO, that originators can stream.
I had netflix, have amazon, and joined late.
I'd like to know who to blame. I know who to blame for reality TV, and I'd love to add to my knowledge store.
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Its the other way around. Netflix started doing originals because the other distributors were either unwilling to play ball at all, or were asking for licensing fees that Netflix was unwilling or unable to pay.
Now those of you in the US might not see it that way, because the original problems were (mostly) not US-centric -- it started during the time that Netflix was trying to grown their global markets and US-based distributors were asking for stupid things like equal (or greater) licensing costs for a sh
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This is Hulu 2.0.
Funny your mention them. Because I could have sworn Disney just got into a deal with Hulu [techcrunch.com].
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This is Cable 3.0
Eventually the distributors will catch on to the idea that consumers don't like paying so many separate bills for content every month, so they will offer bundles of the most popular providers for a set price for month. Sure, these bundles will often include content that you're not interested in, but you won't have a choice.
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The question is what will all these independent streaming companies do when it becomes clear we're not going to pay monthly fees for 10 different companies each of which has one or two shows we care about and 99% junk.
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we're not going to pay monthly fees for 10 different companies
With Amazon you just pay for each movie. Youtube also has a la carte movies with no recurring membership fee. These new services could do the same.
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Sure but 1 cost as much or more as a whole month's subscription. Guardians of the galaxy 2 for example costs more than 2 months of prime video.
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People have been clamoring for a la carte cable channel subscriptions. Now we've got it in the form of a streaming service for each channel.
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People have been clamoring for a la carte cable channel subscriptions. Now we've got it in the form of a streaming service for each channel.
What they were clamoring for was "I don't want X channels for Y dollars per month, I want X/10 channels for Y/10 dollars."
So now with all these pay streaming services they will pay 3x the amount they used to for the same TV watching. Yay, progress.
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I'm pretty sure there's a difference between paying $1-2 per channel per month, and paying $10-20 per "channel" per month. Someone paying $150 for cable might be happy to get their bill to drop to $100 by only subscribing to the channels they care about.. but they're not going to be happy if the bill went up to $1000 for them to go a la carte.
That's not even counting the paying multiple entities aspect one of the other replies mentions.
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Let me check here on our quarterly growth statement: OK, it says "lol we don't give a fuck not our problem".
Do the companies realize we flocked to netflix so long ago because it DID solve the problem?
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:4, Interesting)
My suspicion is that they do realize Netflix solved a problem, but they're not looking at the right problem because Netflix solved at least two:
1) A good amount of content that people wanted.
2) Lots of content that people didn't care about (or didn't know they cared about until they tried it,) but gave them something to put on when they were bored.
All of these companies think we'll happily pony up $10, $15, maybe $20 per month to each of them in order to continue solving problem #1. But that's not the real problem that Netflix solved. Problem #1 is already solved sufficiently well by piracy. Netflix addressing it as well makes for good press, but doesn't really sway subscribers to any large extent.
Netflix' big selling point is that they solved #2. None of the walled garden approaches will fix that since almost by definition, they will have small content libraries. To some extent cable solves #2 as well, but since 90% of the cable channels are useless filler, there's many times where there's plenty on but absolutely none of it is worth watching -- that is, the minute-by-minute "library" on cable is also extremely limited. (And of course with Netflix, you aren't getting blasted with commercials on top of your monthly payment, though that's a smaller issue in the grand scheme of things as most people are well adjusted to ignoring commercials by now.)
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:5, Interesting)
One, of all the networks, Disney is perhaps the only one with a catalog full enough to actually present a good competitor to Netflix.
Two, I think this is a reaction to Netflix buying up Millarworld [variety.com].
Overnight Netflix went from being a popular platform for delivering Disney product to a direct competitor to Disney's very profitable Marvel IP. It was inevitable, really, Netflix is tired of being Hollywood's bitch over licensing properties and they've been very proactive about fixing that, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they don't buy out an actual studio. Regardless, Disney probably felt distinctly uncomfortable with the move, and knowing they do have a very large catalog of desirable properties felt safe launching their own service.
Re:Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Score:4, Insightful)
Bullshit. This Disney "announcement" was a side-note in their last quarters earnings result.
Disney isn't concerned about a bunch of B-comics like Jupiters Circle [millarworld.tv].
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When you need to pay $15 bucks each for twenty different services, I stop wasting time watching TV.
And for the record - they got Bambi's mom, but they're going to pay.... deerly. (Disney's live action Bambi movie [youtube.com]).
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Wait it's about to get better, thanks to Amazon and their great idea of digital channels. They already sell their own hardware. Soon there's going to be bundles. They're just cloudifying the cable company.
More and more (Score:5, Interesting)
This all resembles when the studios vertically "integrated" the movie houses... And were eventually forced to divest.
Let's see... What all does Comcast own/control.
No, we don't need network neutrality
Re:More and more (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe you should look at a bit of a distance... Not be so blindly literal.
As I said, it looks the same as in the 20s when the studios (Disney) vertically integrated the movie houses (their own distribution "channels"). Fox theaters weren't allowed to run Paramount or Universal films... Eventually the outlets were actually owned by Fox, Paramount, Universal etc.
While it's isn't Comcast or the internet in this instance, in principal, it IS the same thing.
Legislation was eventually passed disallowing this type of practice.
So sad I had to spell it out SO precisely.
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At first, the studios didn't own the movie houses either. Over time, independent movies houses couldn't compete and were bought up. The studios didn't own the roads either, but the movies houses (not to mention distribution companies).
At one time, several years ago, I started "following the money" with google searches on who owned what. I started with the theater chains. I found a small handful of "amusement" companies from the midwest owned all the major theater chains, huge chunks (if not controlling i
Won't even notice they're gone. (Score:2, Funny)
I won't even notice they're gone. I refuse to watch their content even when it is present.
My max is two paid streaming services (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services. Billing, passwords, setting up and maintaining devices, etc is a real hassle.If it's not on either service, I am not going to watch it. Period.
I have Netflix, and I have Amazon Prime*
This is plenty, I can watch 99% of what I want, and if it's critically important (movie night with friends), we'll do a 24 hour streaming rental. Maybe when we have kids we'll dump netflix for disney, but until that day, we'll just stop watching disney movies. It's just not worth it as an adult with limited free time, a commute and other priorities.
*We do have HBO now, through Prime, but we're huge Game of Thrones nerds, and it bills/streams through the Amazon Prime app so it's pretty low hassle
Re:My max is two paid streaming services (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services.
Really, all this fragmentation will kill the business. Without one stop shopping and reasonable prices, it's better to just go back to bittorrent.
Re:My max is two paid streaming services (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, all this fragmentation will kill the business. Without one stop shopping and reasonable prices, it's better to just go back to bittorrent.
I've probably posted this before, but in any case - I fully expect the next several years to be really, really annoying for those of us trying to "do the right thing" and pay for content. Every entity which owns even a tiny piece of some popular show or movie is going to attempt to launch their own streaming service.
Eventually most of them will shut down after losing lots of money, and things will consolidate back to just a few aggregators - but until then it's going to be stupidly annoying.
In the meantime I'm not going to pay for a streaming service just for one show - not Star Trek, not Stargate, not Star Search. There's already more streaming content available than I could reasonably see in my lifetime.
Re:My max is two paid streaming services (Score:4, Insightful)
'do the right thing' went out the window decades ago.
the new game is: screw unto other before others can screw unto you.
or, restated, do whatever you can, ethics or not, as long as you make money. customer rights? not relevant. fair use? not relevant. DRM? yup, still there and still a PITA.
I gave up trying to care, anymore. the rich guys pay no taxes, have offshore accounts, make their own laws and we little people have OUR laws (which are enforced, unlike laws for rich folks and corps).
I look at all this and say: why is it that THEY get to bend/break rules and get away with it, and yet we're expected to just keep following the ones set down FOR US?
after I thought about it, I stopped wanting to be their fool and their sucker.
I torrent and could not care less about their profits or business model. they do whatever they want and they get away with it, and so I'll fight fire with fire and do whatever the fuck I want.
yes, its gotton to that.
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Really, all this fragmentation will kill the business. Without one stop shopping and reasonable prices, it's better to just go back to bittorrent.
I'm not sure I agree. Isn't "a la carte" what we wanted and were unable to get with the cable companies for many years? Well, now we have it. These individual services have to compete with the current price models and with each other, meaning that you can still subscribe to four services easily and still pay far less than the vast majority of cable packages.
I don't think we'll ever have more than half a dozen major services, and the rest will be highly specialized or also-rans. I'm totally fine with tha
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I'm not sure I agree. Isn't "a la carte" what we wanted and were unable to get with the cable companies for many years? Well, now we have it.
Alas, this doesn't get us to real a al carte. People want to select the channels they want to watch, pay a single bill and use a single remote to flip through those channels and record the programs for later viewing (or view on demand.) None of these new services offer this. And if you want 15 channels at $10/mo, that's more than cable.
Most streaming services are terrible in terms of UI and streaming quality.
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Alas, this doesn't get us to real a al carte. People want to select the channels they want to watch, pay a single bill and use a single remote to flip through those channels and record the programs for later viewing (or view on demand.).
To me, à la carte needs to be more fine-grained than just choosing channels. And more fine-grained than just choosing shows. I'd like all movies and individual TV episodes to be available for separate rental or purchase at a reasonable price. Google Play is getting there, but it looks like more stuff is being locked away in streaming bundles. It's bundling Mark 2.
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Yes, a la carte was what we wanted. But we didn't want it to come with dozens of monthly bills, we wanted to still have just a single bill.
We don't have "dozens". At the moment, we have FOUR. There's Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and YouTube as the current big four, plus a number of smaller specialty channels. Now add Disney as well, if it succeeds. But most people are not planning to subscribe to ALL of them, just as few people subscribed to ALL the channels available on cable.
If you were getting a single bill, it would mean there wasn't any competition between these services. A single monolithic company that serves everything you want is
Re: My max is two paid streaming services (Score:2)
And Showtime, and HBO, and AMC. That doesn't even cover specialty stuff like Spanish telenovelas, Spanish football/Soccer, and I'd imagine Japanese xyz stuff. Plus NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, NASCAR, Formula 1, etc etc ad nauseum
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You forgot Cinemax. Yes, I covered that with "plus a number of smaller specialty channels", in case you missed it. And you make all those options sound like a bad thing. I disagree. I'm not interested in most of that, and I'm thankful I don't have to pay for the channels I don't want. On the other hand, the specialty channels are awesome at giving you lots of what you DO want for a reasonable price.
I subscribe, like you, to Netflix and Prime, which gives me plenty of "normal" TV. I also subscribe to a
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Same. I've got Netflix & Prime, I don't want to pirate, I like financially supporting the movies, music, books, and games that I enjoy, but I don't like where this is going. Maybe if their services are reasonably priced, I'll consider it, but you damn well know that everything is going to be as much or more than Netflix. Then the commercials will start coming, and you know they will, then just you wait and see, there will be premium subscriptions, and we'll be right back to square one. But hey, if t
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Same with me. Two is it, and even that's pushing it.
I have Netflix, which I can watch anywhere at any time. However, discovering new shows is hard and they pretty much just have their original programming at this point. Everything else is total crap. With the Disney properties, they actually had other stuff to watch but I wasn't expecting it to stay around. Now they will effectively be a single channel or network, but with a budget larger than everyone else by several times. On the other hand, I like a lot
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Premium? You mean like how hulu started as a paid with ads service and now offers a premium service with less ads? (but they won't sell an ad free service because fuck you)
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I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services. Billing, passwords, setting up and maintaining devices, etc is a real hassle.If it's not on either service, I am not going to watch it. Period.
This is made even more annoying by the very real possibility that every service will not necessarily be available on every device you actually want to watch content on. Sure, Netflix and Amazon Prime do a fairly decent job in this department, but they also have the experienced engineering resources to dedicate to the effort. There's really no guarantee that every other little two-bit studio-specific streaming service will do the same.
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I think Amazon's play here is really smart. We too have HBO through that route when we probably wouldn't bother with it otherwise. Being able to add a streaming service for a few months without any billing or device hassles is pretty huge.
Force Awakens was garbage (Score:2, Flamebait)
That means Netflix should be able to stream the next two Star Wars movies, but it'll miss out on the new trilogy's final installment.
and nothing of value was lost...
Sorry, Disney, you lose my "eyes", not Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
No way am I going to sign up for Disney's streaming service. There are too many streaming services already and I'm going to stick with the successful ones that have the broadest offerings.
If I were Disney, I would be pushing for a fair revenue sharing deal. Push Netflix to share out their revenue to the content providers according to the fraction of time watched, and push Netflix to provide transparency so this can be audited. Netflix, in turn, should charge a reasonable delivery/infrastructure fee, and share out the revenue for content "blind" to where the content comes from. I.e., if their own content generation produces 30% of the viewing, their own content generation division gets 30% of the content revenue.
--PeterM
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I think Netflix basically has two options:
1. Drop all non-original stuff and become the world's largest movie and serial provider, or
2. Start offering add-ons where you can drop in the Disney catalog, the CBS catalog, etc. (Like Amazon does, but much better.)
These idiot network executives see Netflix's revenue, and they figure they deserve half of that for their lame catalog. Netflix says no, so they pull their stuff and think "that will show them!" Hardly. They'll all be irrelevant in 10 years except Netfl
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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I just was thinking yesterday: Know what I need? Another streaming service in my life!
The world needs this like it needs another messaging service or phone payment system.
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I just was thinking yesterday: Know what I need? Another streaming service in my life!
The world needs this like it needs another messaging service or phone payment system.
Or another Linux distro. :-)
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Yep. I'm tapped out at this point. I've got Netflix. I've got Amazon video ONLY because it comes with Prime for "free". Other than that - I'm done. I subscribed to Hulu for a good year and a half before I realized I wasn't watching it. Same with Sling.
Truthfully while I'd be fine paying a little more than I am for Netflix (i'd probably be willing to go up to $19.95), I'm not going to keep tacking on a service for tons of different networks unless they're priced VERY competitively. Like, $4/month or l
Wise of Disney (Score:3)
Re:Wise of Disney (Score:4, Insightful)
Thing is, it'd likely be cheaper to just buy the DVDs / Blurays of the Disney movies you want, rip them yourself and then watch them whenever you'd like.
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Thing is, it'd likely be cheaper to just buy the DVDs / Blurays of the Disney movies you want, rip them yourself and then watch them whenever you'd like.
You do know that movies make less than 1% of the total volume of what Disney has produced, right? Take a look at this list. These are all series which each comprise dozens if not hundreds of episodes. Yeah, you go ahead and buy all those DVD sets and tell me that's cheaper than paying for streaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That vault isn't THAT big. Maybe if they pulled a backlog of all the shows that have ever been on The Disney Channel and made them available they'd have enough to warrant an entire service, but I doubt it.
There's also the question of clients. Netflix has done VERY well by basically developing a client for any box you can imagine that connects a TV. PCs, tablets, Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, and pretty much all current video game consoles all have a Netflix client. Heck with a smart TV you might not even nee
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Unless Disney throws a large team of programmers at it it'll be hard for them to match Netflix's ubiquity.
That's true. They are reducing the friction to be entertained, and all these other services are increasing it. We'll see what people want, but low friction choices almost always win.
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has a massive catalog with a very well-defined market.
Unfortunately they also have a market defined predominantly by people who fall into the category of not old enough to have money, or pirates. I would happily wager only a few percent of people watch Disney content on Netflix accounts which they paid for, as opposed to another member of their family.
Vid Angel (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if this has to do with the Vid Angel/Disney lawsuit and the recent workaround that allows Vid Angel to filter Disney movies on Netflix. By moving their movies off of Netflix, they effectively block Vid Angel again.
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What is Vid Angel?
I've just been to their website and read the "About Us" and I'm still none the wiser.
Not understanding how it's a blow to Netflix. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this a blow to Netflix. No shot in hell I'm paying for another streaming service just for Disney's dinky library. So this just means I will torrent the Disney movies and Netflix can free up some revenue for other movies or more original content.
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How is this a blow to Netflix. No shot in hell I'm paying for another streaming service just for Disney's dinky library
Maybe, but it also lessens the value of Netflix's library, again. The content companies have been chipping away at it as best they can in the last few years.
Netflix's value was built on two things: original series, and being the one-stop-shop for all content. I always found the latter far far more valuable. Without it, they become just another hbo or disney or amc. A much more precarious situation. Worse yet, the customers lose what had been an incredibly useful service.
I am SO glad to see them go (Score:2)
It's so hard keeping my daughter from watching their two hour advertisements. I'm honestly extremely happy they are pulling out.
Video Games (Score:5, Interesting)
Disney already tried this with licensing out their characters to other companies to produce video games. They decided to stop that practice entirely and use an in-house game studio instead. Their games went to shit. Then a couple years later, they started licensing out again.
I have a feeling that history will repeat itself with this news of licensing streaming content.
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Disney already tried this with licensing out their characters to other companies to produce video games. They decided to stop that practice entirely and use an in-house game studio instead. Their games went to shit. Then a couple years later, they started licensing out again.
I have a feeling that history will repeat itself with this news of licensing streaming content.
So, Disney is bad at making video games. They seem to be pretty successful at making movies; have been for a century. Streaming licensing has nothing to do with the making of movies, it's just one distribution channel, and not even the most lucrative.
Completely different situations.
Battle of the century folks! (Score:2)
The titan of original content..... The coolest of the streams, and the great keeper of the DVDs.... ***NETFLIX***!!!!
(crowd wildly chanting "STREAM-ING STREAM-ING")
vs
(fog machines to full blast)
The dark cabal of children's entertainment!!, the cartoonists you love to hate!!... the gatekeepers of American football, the extenders of copyright law!! The champions of the DMCA!.....MARVEL/ABC/DISNEY/ESPN!!!!!!!
(booooooooo)
We cut the cord for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Soon there will be so many streaming services that if you want to be able to watch everything you're going to pay more money than the cable subscription you canceled.
What the heck is the point? We're back to square one: It's too damn expensive, might as well pirate the content.
Save the moral arguments; it doesn't matter. There's a point where the cost involved becomes prohibitive, and people still want to see the content. Make of that what you will.
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the heck is the point? We're back to square one: It's too damn expensive,
That IS the point -- to make content more expensive. The content cartels were crying for years and years that the Netflix model was unfair and in the age of the Blu Ray they were getting cheated, CHEATED out of billions because people weren't paying ridiculous pay-per-view fees. Well copyright gives them the power to own any distribution, and they know people will pay up.
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I'm not paying $180/yr to see Game of Thrones
Last time I checked the new episodes for Season 7 are 3 bucks each on Google's Play store.
Cables comeback... (Score:3)
More and more companies start their own steaming service and remove their shows from the existing services...
Now you'll have to subscribe to a half dozen or more streaming services to see the shows you might be interested in...
Cable prices aren't looking as crazy anymore...
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It's still in the early days of the business model. IMHO, most people aren't going to subscribe to more than a few services. IMHO, over the next 5-10 years we'll see a LOT of studios and companies dip their toes into the streaming pool, only for their ventures to fail and them start looking for a partner service to distribute their shows.
We may end up with a few more mainstream services than we have now, but honestly the market just can't support having a billable streaming service for everything that use
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OR, use the OTA model online - put out you own client that streams the shows for no cost but pay for it with ads/commercials.
Personally, I think that one is the worst scenario. Not the least likely, but the worst for the audiences. My time is a lot more valuable to me as time than it is to them as "attention". I'd rather just make money doing the thing I do to make money, and send it to them for the content than have to sit a thousand dollars worth of time through commercials for a hundred dollars worth of entertainment.
I don't think there's inherently a problem with everyone going their own on streaming, either, but I don't thin
Fuck You, Disney. (Score:4, Insightful)
Netflix. HBO. Amazon. Hulu. And now, Disney.
You know, the reason people started cutting cords was due to the fucking cost being forced upon us. $100 split across half a dozen streaming services is just as financially painful as a $100 cable bill. I hope Disney finds a loss with this bullshit move.
Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2? Way to "innovate" with yet another channel full of fucking sequels. Gee, can't wait for Star Wars, Episode 27. How original.
HBO is good. Disney better not force ESPN on peopl (Score:2)
HBO is good. Disney better not force ESPN on people to get this.
and they own star wars and are going to fuck over Indy in indiana Jones 5.
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HBO is good. Disney better not force ESPN on people to get this.
and they own star wars and are going to fuck over Indy in indiana Jones 5.
In our efforts to go green, we've taken the concept of recycling a bit too far. A movie only succeeds today if it's fractured into two dozen 5-minute action sequences, stitched across a predictable story with a cast of familiar characters, all in order to guarantee an ability to regurgitate another one next year. Perhaps the death of the attention span is more to blame when catering to the simple masses.
I loved Indiana Jones. I have zero interest in seeing yet another Indy movie. Sadly, Stallone will pr
fuck you disney (Score:4, Insightful)
Irrelevant in Australia (Score:3)
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WTF! (Score:3)
I swear, everybody wants a piece of the streaming pie, but, AGAIN, they have NO CLUE what consumers want (or they just don't care - in which case, fuck them all). They had a much better chance bundling under Amazon Prime, Netflix, or Hulu, and that way consumers still had a better option than premium cable.
I will NOT pay for a streaming service for every channel or studio that broadcasts 1-2 things I watch. That being said, goodbye Disney. You can join the ranks of all the other morons in media I've disowned (HBO, Showtime, CBS, etc).
Cheers.
Re: (Score:3)
Slowly but surely, these greedoids have been screwing down the controls. They might not exactly own every government in the world whose population wants access to this kind of entertainment, but they own enough parts of enough governments to be right on the verge of getting most people's computers under control.
For the next step, just look at China. I fully expect that within the next few years, VPN's will simply be outlawed in all the major markets "because kiddie porn" or "because terrorism" or "because
Ave Imperator! (Score:2)
"Disney is promising about '10,000 live regional, national, and international games and events a year,' with individual sports packages available as well,"
They've obviously got the circuses part down. All we need now is the bread.
netflix has disney? (Score:2)
subscriber for years, didn't notice.
Yeah. Fuck that noise. (Score:3)
I have a sub to Netflix and I have a sub to Amazon Prime.
That's all I'm investing in.
DC wants their own streaming network for additional money. Fuck them.
Disney wants their own streaming network for additional money. Fuck them.
I don't get cable TV because I already pay $150/month for my internet service and I don't really watch anything on TV.
For the few things I have an interest in, I'm not going to pay additional amounts of money for multiple networks that essentially add up to a cable TV bill.
If I can't get the shit I want on Netflix or Amazon, I simply won't watch. Plain and simple.
COULD I afford it? Sure. Will I allow myself to be repeatedly "held up" for yet ANOTHER subscription service?
HELL THE FUCK NO.
And I, frankly, don't see what's wrong with continuing to license older content to another streaming network, and hold your own new content strictly to your network (outside of purchases) for 4-6 months. This way you continue bringing in licensing bucks and can still present on your own network for essentially no cost.
But no! It's not like Disney is sitting on a NINETY YEAR CACHE OF CONTENT or anything.
It's not like Warner Brothers has NINETY FIVE YEARS OF CONTENT.
With all of the studios that have come, gone, merged, etc, there are literally tens (if not hundreds) of millions of hours of content out of the major studios in the past century. Even if only one percent of which was considered "worthwhile", that's still hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of hours of excellence in programming. That's more than anyone could watch in a given lifetime. And that's before taking into account the pleasures of repeat viewing.
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Bye Disney (Score:2)
Nope (Score:2)
Disney will take itself off Google (Score:3)
Disney will take itself off Google and launch a competing search engine. They'll call it something cool like Infoseek or Go.com. I'm sure it's going to be very successful.
News from 2020 (Score:3)
Disney in an uproar as piracy soars. Demands Congress increases copyright protection to life of the universe + 100 years.
I'm sure this service will be a huge hit (Score:2)
With blackjack and hookers! (Score:3)
ESPN is killing Disney (Score:3)
This is really about shoring up the revenue streams. ESPN has had layoffs and major drops in revenue, and it's only going to get worse over the next several years. The whole model is changing, and C-suite types are going to get desperate.
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Netflix has a bunch of Disney shows (but not movies, strangely) that I love to watch. But I have zero problems with finding something else to watch when Disney is gone. I didn't watch or enjoy those shows because they were Disney. I watched and enjoyed them because they were good.
Netflix is fully capable of making great original programming, and I will watch them when I find them.
Re:Ala-carte disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
What - wait - I thought you couldn't afford the rising cable/satellite rates! Now you can't afford a la carte?
If you think these various streaming offerings mean that you're not going to pay a hell of a lot more for them than cable, you're a sucker.
People were open and honest with what they really wanted with the success of Netflix: they wanted everything in one nice place for a reasonable price. For a number of years that's what we got. It wasn't customers who killed this model, it was the content companies.