Disney Launches Netflix Competitor: Disney+ | Hacker News Reader

Disney Launches Netflix Competitor: Disney+

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51 pointsccwilson1028 comments

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of "streaming aggregators" that bundle together Netflix/Hulu/Disney+/etc. subscriptions into a single thing so you don't have to manage several individual subscriptions. I'm sure that exists already, actually.

Thus completing the cycle back to whence we came (from cable subscriptions), but on the internet instead of television.

I think those are called "torrent sites", where people get the streams from multiple services and aggregate them on a single site.

Meanwhile, everyone else seems to be interested in forcing users to pay for and use as many different services as possible, starting with 5G's network slicing features.

Meh, I get what you’re trying to say but ultimately I’d rather pay content providers for making the content.

I don’t have a moral qualm about pirating. But I’d rather pay for convenience.

I stopped pirating music when the iTunes Music Store came out. It wasn’t worth dealing with the hassle of Napster/Kazaa/Limewire.

I’m not above getting a movie or tv series “off the back of a truck”, but if I want something now I’ll rent it from iTunes. I’ve even bought a few movies from Amazon, Google, and iTunes now that you can sync most purchased movies between all three services via Movies Anywhere.

I also pay for Hulu, Amazon Prime, DirectV Now, and get Netflix free from T-mobile.

These guys have a legion of lawyers, maybe they can put them to good use and draft up a profit sharing agreement that underpins a shared service that has all their collective content on it. If they try to downstream their inability to play nice with each other to me by asking me to juggle the updates, breakages, outages, and platform incompatibilities of 5 different streaming services, I'm just gonna go hit the high seas because it's objectively easier. It's not about money.

That is a startup idea I've shelved. It would allow "pirates only due to laziness" to go "You know, I quite like that show/game, give the creators $5/$10/$20" anonymously. Of course, this would need to be so easy that someone lazy would still use it at all...

On the AppleTV there is an app called TV which attempts to aggregate all of the streaming services into one place.

Only a few players are on board however.

Well, almost all of them except Netflix are pretty much on-board. The same app is on iPhones as well, and I use Netflix a lot less as a result of their lack of integration.

That said, it doesn't aggregate the actual subscription charges, the parent is thinking of something more like VRV, or I don't know, the free Netflix subscription you get with some T-Mobile plans.

Netflix is the big player that's not participating, but there are a lot of decently sized companies that don't show up. I'm pretty sure I was searching for things the PBS app offered for free, but the only result was the same things for sale through iTunes.

Hoopla and Kanopy are services that offer feature films through your local library. They both have appleTV apps, but neither appear in the TV app.

Jim Barksdale:

Gentlemen, there’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling

Avon Barksdale:

“You know the difference between me and you? I bleed red and you bleed green.”

If I'm interested in a particular show, I usually use https://justwatch.com to see which streaming service(s) carry it.

Once that's narrowed down, it's usually not a problem to pull up the respective app and start the show. Something integrated might save the redundant in-app search but that's probably less than one minute of the average 45 minute viewing session.

First time I've ever done this but there's this show I literally cannot find anywhere online legally.

I had to buy some old DVD's which I fully intend to rip into x265 hevc and spread around online - just to preserve it.

It's called The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJVCr7H3rco

Thank you for trying to make media accessible in this way. I know you're breaking the law, but someone must restrain copyright's long arm.

Looks like it all got released by scene groups back at the time but I haven't checked if it's still shared anywhere - another copy never hurts!

https://predb.me/?search=Jamie+kennedy+experiment

VRV works on that model, but it's mostly a niche subscription bundle -- Crunchyroll, HIDIVE, Shudder, that sort of thing.

Youtube TV seems to be one of them: https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/

Though it aggregates digital cable channels on the net.

Forget that, I’m still waiting for affordable a la carte cable channels.

I think in the long run, it would Netflix vs Amazon Prime. The prime channels is a very unique way to keep users in a single app and access the content from other networks.

I synced my HBO to Prime, so I don't have to switch apps. They already have content from Showtime, HBO, Starz, if they could get disney on board. You will basically end up using Netflix vs Prime apps.(or Hulu).

I think there will be two other players for sure:

Apple has ridiculous amounts of money to play with and they will instantly jump to tens of millions of subscribers when they bundle it with Apple Music and Apple Magazines.

Disney simply has too much incredible content to be ignored. Pixar, Marvel and everything from Fox. At the very least it will dominate as the preferred choice for families. Also just saw then that Disney which owns 60% of Hulu are interested in buying the rest of the company. If they did I imagine they would shut it down and fold it into Disney+ as well.

I already pay for my HBO and Hulu subs through iTunes. Makes it easy to mange.

Amazon has some of the poorest content out there at the moment and quite a good distribution system. There's only a handful of great shows they make, at least so far.

Contrast that to Disney which is aces on content, and a wildcard on distribution. It's more likely than not to be a bigger competitor than Prime.

Amazon is where I get a lot of the content I can't get anywhere else on a subscription basis. Their Prime content is meh, but their paid library is NICE.

Q: How competent Disney is in terms of technology: content distribution over internet, multiple form factor of devices, taking care of scale, latency, slow network, and then algorithms for big data analysis - devising content strategies, customizing as per consumer taste, preference...

Can we see equivalent of this from Disney https://medium.com/netflix-techblog

Or, it is that Disney just uploads their existing content on web with some kind of delayed release logic along with a payment gateway.

Disney is CRAZY competent at content distribution.

ESPN is a Disney company, Movies Anywhere (is/was) a Disney project, the Disney+ service they are talking about is actually public v2.0 (They rolled out something similar in Europe a few years back, called Disney Life).

Disney has a universal "login" system, that shares your profile/preferences everywhere from parks to cable, its got everything favorite sports teams/players and can serve up custom content and more.

There is a lot going on at the house of mouse. (Do a job search on the Disney website and set your region to tech hub outside of LA/Orlando...)

The Disney Streaming Blog is relatively new: https://medium.com/disney-streaming

Also check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAMTech for more info on the team behind the scenes.

Think about the brand awareness, marketing savvy, and analytics endeavours they have to manage their movie empire. They're not dropping Billion dollar movies every few months by accident.

On the streaming side they've got multiple tech houses under their umbrella with oodles of experience on all fronts.

Naw, Disney has gathered multiple cultural touchstones and is putting them all onto their managed platform. This is a stunning play for a generation of content consumers, and arguably puts everyone else in a race for second place.

Speaking of which: an HBO/NetFlix merger has never made more sense...

Disney owns BAMTech, the company responsible for the baseball streaming service and they rearchitected HBOs service after HBOs in house effort flailed.

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