Disney Announces $12.99 Bundle for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+

It wouldbbe bice

Let's say that we did have a law that would force content owners to license their content. Let's say that the royalty rate would be $3 per movie stream. Companies like Netflix would have to hugely increase their monthly fees. 4 movie streams a month and you've blown through their fee considering hardware, electricity, credit card processing fees, etc. Likewise, if TV episodes cost $1 per stream, people would very quickly blow through the $13/mo fee that Netflix charges. Plus, with more content, people would watch a lot more.

Ultimately, what people want is a streaming service with most of what they want to watch at a fraction of the price that people used to pay for content. It used to be that people would pay $75 for cable tv or satellite plus $10-20/mo for one or two premium channels plus $4 every time they wanted to rent a movie from Blockbuster. Now people want that same experience for one $15 fee. I mean, would you sign up for a streaming service that had 80% of the content you wanted for $100+/mo? Do you think most people would?

Netflix and competitors want to encourage you to binge on their service now. How does that change if they have to pay compulsory license fees for every stream? What happens to content if they're getting paid a set fee-per-stream rather than a negotiated rate? We've seen in music that songs have been getting shorter because the royalty rates are per-stream not per-minute and the shorter your songs, the more royalties you'll get. We've seen a lot of clickbait video on YouTube and, frankly, Netflix is putting up more and more cheap-to-make content, knocking off every random baking show and the like. With a compulsory license, Netflix would want to make it hard to watch the shows that they had to pay-per-stream. Would they even want to make them available at all?

I think we had a few year period where content owners didn't realize how much streaming would substitute for other watching modes and made good deals for Netflix. I think any compulsory license would be higher than a service could go for at current rates. You're talking about getting rid of other large revenue streams via this compulsory licensing. Right now, they can give you a bunch of content as all-you-can-eat and then hold on to their premium content and get a lot of people to pay a separate charge. For example, I can stream a lot of Disney content, but it looks like Avengers Endgame will only be available for purchase separately. If you're getting rid of that, they aren't going to want to give up that money.

Heck, even in music, we see that the compulsory licensing rates are high to the point that places like Apple Music want to negotiate revenue-sharing agreements rather than pay the compulsory license. If you're paying $10/mo for a streaming service and they're paying $0.091 per stream and you're listening in the car on a 20-minute commute twice a day, that's 10 songs per day and 300 songs per month costing them $27.3. And that's a short commute and not taking into consideration errands, workouts, listening at work, etc.

So, even in music, the compulsory license isn't what most streaming services are relying on. They've negotiated a cut-of-revenue system to compensate artists rather than paying $0.091/stream.

I think the problem is that we want to pay the same ~$10 fee for our video entertainment, but video entertainment costs a lot more to produce and doesn't have the same re-watch/listen potential as music. A song doesn't cost $350M to write and record and, ultimately, a good song can provide hours of listening enjoyment just like the movie. It's easy to accept a cut of $10/mo when your product is a lot cheaper to produce. The problem we face is that video producers want more than a cut of $15/mo due to the cost of producing their product, but we don't want to pay more. We had the glory days of Netflix having access to cheap content. We don't want that to end.

You're not wrong about the feeling of gaming you. The problem is that people don't want to spend $100/mo, but they want all the content from services that used to cost that. So they're trying to find ways to retain the revenue while offering enough of what people want to a broad audience. They know people will balk at a $100/mo service even if many of them have been paying for cable and HBO and such. So they're trying to figure out what people will accept. Frankly, Netflix is doing that too: they're trying to figure out what content they can produce cheaply to get people to stick around without them having to license content.

I think the ultimate problem is that the video content we want costs more to make than the music content we want.

Should there be more laws requiring that others get access things you paid for? If you don’t use a corner of your back yard should you be forced to lease it to someone? If you haven’t used your workout equipment for 90 days should you be forced to let members of the public come in and make better use of it?

In your view, how can they improve the interface - other than improving the recommendation algorithm. I find myself browsing their catalog for 20 minutes or so and then end up not watching anything.

And totally agree with you on not cancelling shows. For example one of their better, more creative and daring shows was the OA. Cancelled. One of Netflix's USP could be that they are a place where people go to watch non lowest common denominator shows. But of course this takes time to get up the viewership numbers up and doesn't help them in the short term, hence why they have to cancel shows I guess.

That's a pretty ridiculous way of putting it, given that those same two people are also responsible for creating one of the most successful shows in TV history.

What will determine the success of this decision is the quality of what they produce. The number of people who will cancel their subscription simply due to D&D's involvement seems like a completely insignificant risk.

I would like blockbuster to come back too, it was a fun family moment every saturday evening.

It's pretty easy these days to go, "Is this on Netflix? No. Is this on Prime? No." Adding "Is this on Disney+?" isn't a huge burden and it's still miles cheaper than cable and ad free...

I predict we will see the backlash against digital media become mainstream soon.

That being said, if Disney+ makes it to Denmark, that might actually be the one streaming service we want because of our children.

It probably should be noted that the Danish national public service tv station has streaming apps for all their channels, as well as a Netflix style selection for their own content. So that gives us 6 commercial free BBC quality channels.

It depends what the Disney+ catalog is like and whether they infest it with ads, too; ESPN+ has ads, and the Hulu tier in the bundle of the ad-heavy tier. So, it's looking a lot like paying for a package of basic cable channels compared to paying for a premium package with Netflix or HBO. There might be more total content, but it's offset by advertising: what your ad tolerance is will be a big factor in which is better.

Of course, as with basic cable and premium channels, there's no reason one has to win over the other—plenty of people could end up paying for both.

Does anyone know if NBC owns those rights to stream stateside? IIRC, NBC Sports is the Premier League hub while Fox Sports tends to host more Bundesliga (German football club) matches.

Other reporting has indicated they plan to offer Disney+ separately as a standalone, and also as an add-on through Amazon Prime and some other services, the same way HBO Now and some other services are offered.

Honestly, account sharing seems to be wave of the future. Eg, my buddy keeps his cable, I give him my Netflix and Amazon logins, and I get his HBO and ESPN logins.