Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

At least it’s video on demand now. I still can’t even watch time delayed sporting events on xfinity’s atreaming thing.

If there are only a couple of different offerings, it makes sense to think "I'm going to subscribe to 1-3 of these every month".

I think with a more fragmented streaming services, it's easier to get into the mindset of "Which shows do I want to watch? I want to watch these shows in 2-3 months by subscribing to these". PITA compared to having one or two streaming services which have almost everything; but, cheaper than "subscribe just in case there's something to watch".

I don't mind watching shows way after they release, though.

If you are interested in one or two shows from a service - subscribe for a month (or we) and unsubscribe when done.

I think we are close to seeing the "true cost" for TV show production and distribution. I have a feeling that before the Internet, advertisers couldn't measure the return on their investment, and so were paying too much for TV ads, making TV cheap for the end user. In addition, people were forced to buy channels they didn't watch, subsidizing them for people that did. Now we are close to paying the true cost. I think that's better for the companies involved and for the consumer; the only incentive is to produce TV that they want to watch. You don't like it, you stop paying them, they go out of business. That is the most fair of all business models.

That 3hr highlight reel they dropped last week was such a flex. I'd get it just to get all their old animation movies.

Disney's library is stronger than anyone else's and they know it

Are you suggesting that it doesn’t count because you assume everyone has a Prime subscription?

Any of them individually, or all of them together? If the latter, then wherever it is you live, you have some ridiculous places for cable TV there.

You are paying for it with Amazon just bundled into the overall price. Probably 10% more.

That's why cable costs so much the bundling of various properties adds up. For now streaming inventors are eating the cost but they expect that to change by 2024.

I just cancelled my Prime subscription since it’s $120 and it seems to just be increasing so they can make more tv shows. Super annoying.

Disney+ already will have espn and Hulu bundled (for a great price to boot).

Disney controls 100% of Hulu now and can own the entire stake by 2024 when their deal with Comcast comes up for decision.

Disney is already doing a bundle for ESPN+, Hulu, Disney+. The Hulu is the lower priced ad one, but still, they’re already mostly there with an ultimate streaming bundle.

You don't have to do anything. You just feel the need to watch everything that can be watched. If you don't want to pay for every service, you should just reset your expectations.

I don't know if I'd go as far to say it's worse. Cable forced one's hand into paying for things they didn't necessarily want. At least with this model, we the consumer have the ability to pick and choose exactly what we want to pay for.

If a network has shows that look appealing to you, subscribe for a couple months. If there's only one show that looks appealing, buy it on iTunes.

We're never going to have an affordable, legal, pay-once-for-everything model.

90%? Disney doesn't really own a lot. They have huge brands in some niches but overall not much % wise. They refuse to touch anything adult in nature and that is the vast majority of content.

No, it’s much better than cable.

Most people don’t watch that much TV and won’t need more than one or two services. Those people are saving a ton of money.

And a few people that are glued to their TVs will pay more. As they should.

I’m particularly happy that I no longer have to subsidize sports, which I never watched, to the tune of $20 a month or so.

Yet another post on HN about a company that needs to be broken up because they are big in some made up market. Now are we going to define a monopoly as the “Pop Culture” market.

Would you also like the government to “build a market” so that everyone can have all the software they want and have the government decide what a fair amount for software is?

>Now we're going to have to pay more AND switch between nine different apps with broken UIs.

Roku, Fire, Apple all make it easy to search and browse for a show and then deep link into the correct app. It's not perfect, and I hope it will get better, but you are not currently forced to open the apps. Fire goes a step further and lets you play videos you are licensed to right out of the fire interface, without the app firing up. It's easy to subscribe to hbo, cbs ets and have the content you are licensed to see show up right with your other stuff. (The Fire interface being not so pleasant to use is another story entirely.)

>Disney needs to be broken up. They own 90% of American pop culture.

Has a company ever been broken up for its library of content?

>build services like Spotify that have everything and merely pay the rights holders.

These platforms above are the single aggregator you are looking for. Comcast and DirecTV were these, but without the option for a la cart.

>pay way less than cable.

You have the option to make it cheaper if you want to rotate your subscriptions and not hold them all at the same time. I see that as a net gain vs the previous status quo of the TV Provider bundle era.

You can't do binge-watching with cable. This is the fundamental difference here.

You can subscribe to one service, binge all you want, change to another, and so on.

> After people binge through new shows, the big 4 will be the ones holding all the old content.

Do most people really want that old content? Apart from a few shows, I say no.

How will there be a race to the bottom on price, when companies like Netflix are barely cashflow positive right now?

Will subscribers really decide to pay $5 a month for a subscription with a bunch of shows they don’t want to watch instead of $10 a month for a subscription with a few shows they really want to see?

How are these companies going to deliver more video ad value per viewer than someone like Google does with YouTube? They may have all of the big brand advertisers lined up, but will they ever even reach parity the revenue per user of Google and Facebook?

> Verizon is making a bad play not gobbling up whats left.

they're the phone company, they don't have to care. The content companies will gobble their knobs now to be allowed access to the pipes they must have. They'll take what they're given and say "thank you."

I hope thats just cynicism and it isn't that way really. Look at how they behave.

The only streaming services that really matter are the ones that are global. Prime, Netflix, Disney. Netflix has a huge headstart. I believe almost 60 % of their subscribers are outside usa. They make local originals in every region they are. Just look at the amount of Spanish language originals that came out this year. Spanish, Dutch, Turkish, Korean, Italian, ... originals. It’s their ‘secret’ weapon.

Verizon digital media is a backend CDN for over half the companies you listed. They’re betting the future of the entire company on cord cutters.

It also seems we are headed towards coupled offerings of content AND connection.

Certain content available via certain ISPs only.

> The extra money will come from people not wanting to watch ads.

Having both an ad-supported and paid ad-free versions of the same product is likely an unstable equilibrium— Customers with disposable income will gravitate towards the ad-free product, and those are the people that advertisers are really paying for access to.

My daughter just started getting into Winnie the Pooh shorts and movies, which we're happy to let her watch and rewatch and rewatch, mostly because they don't annoy us. I have no doubt we'll be buying in to disney+ for her to have access to higher quality cartoons.

The Dead Homer Society's take on it is basically exactly that—the show became what it was satirizing. Throw in a little TV-embraces-criticism-and-makes-it-the-new-normal (cf. David Foster Wallace) and everything else got more like The Simpsons, too.

It looks a little ranty at first glance but ends up being pretty damn thorough and convincing. By season 8 or 9 the show was transitioning away from its old self, and past that it's not really delivering the same thing it was in seasons 1-7 at all, so if you were really into that the later seasons may not scratch the same itch (or itchy the same scratchy?).

https://deadhomersociety.com/zombiesimpsons/

It may be that the sway of the “Moral Majority” has lost its clout. When Ellen first came out as gay on her show it was a big deal in the 90s and Murphy Brown having a child out of wedlock was a talking point by the Vice President.

Now even cartoons aimed at kids show same sex couples (I can’t remember the name of the cartoon) and Disney and most corporations are ignoring them - including protest about an interracial couple.

It totally was controversial in the beginning. It was considered worse than South Park or Family Guy are today. George H.W. Bush (the father) even made a statement that the American family should be "more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons." ("The Waltons" was a series about a wholesome family in Virginia surviving the Great Depression)

When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch it :S

It was at a time when cartoons that came even remotely close to dealing with serious subject matter was deemed to be an adult cartoon. It was a big deal at the time and a lot of the tropes and stuff in the Simpsons that seem tame and trope like today were originally from the Simpsons.

Also, before it was a full TV show, the characters were used in small scenes on ‘The Tracy Ullman Show’.

It’s main character is an incompetent drunken father who regularly strangles his son for annoying him.

It started out controversial and the success normalized it. Now we all just laugh at the kid being strangled.

>Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big releases. No one is going to are about “House of Cards” in five years.

I think you are contradicting yourself here. If the quality was good they wouldn't have mentioned not having big releases as being the reason why their subscriber growth was slow.

>Compare that to Disney’s library. People still care about Disney’s animated movies from the 30s and even adults are nostalgic about the 90s X-men animated TV show and the original Star Wars from the 70s.

I think you are arguing in favor of what I was saying?

>Besides, Disney makes billions from their content from theatrical releases, video on demand, network and cable TV, theme parks, toy sales, etc.

Yes, and for some strange reason Disney trades at 2x the market cap of netflix with 17x p/e while netflix trades at 88x p/e. Either Disney is severely undervalued or Netflix is severely overvalued (or both).

I agree with this analysis. Netflix-created content is hit-or-miss, and generally miss IMO. I honestly keep the subscription alive today for the same reason I started it in the first place, all those years ago - to have on-demand access to old Star Trek TV shows (TNG-ENT). If they drop those shows, I'll drop them.

> People still care about Disney’s animated movies from the 30s and even adults are nostalgic about the 90s X-men animated TV show and the original Star Wars from the 70s.

Come one. Saying people is a cop out? Everyone, no way. So how many people, because that is what matters.

I think what you're describing is squarely in the realm of content quality. They're spending large amounts of money and getting content that's largely junk, and even when it's good, it's buried under so much junk that it's hard to find. HBO spends 1/7th of what they do and has better shows. Netflix has spent billions trying to get one Game of Thrones and failed miserably.

That's what's killing subscriber growth. Lack of quality content. HBO has about the same number of subscribers, at a 50% higher subscription cost. The revenue is there to be had for someone with good enough content.

Despite spending $10b a year, Netflix's biggest shows are still ones it licenses (Friends, The Office, etc.) and they're losing them one by one. They've shown that for whatever reason, quality content isn't a problem you can solve by spending alone.

Loads of young people wouldn't care about Star Wars, Marvel, ... if they didn't release high budget movies regularly. How many kids under 20 care about the biggest franchises from the 80s like Indiana Jones, Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters or ET ? How many adults would still rewatch them ?

I think old content is overrated. People subscribe for the new stuff. If they watch old stuff, it's mostly to fill the time before a new show comes out.

Netflix hasn’t produced anything as a company. They don’t have an internal culture or system to produce content like Pixar. They just pay production companies for exclusives. Any other players could pay the same studios and producers.

While late is better than never, Disney is too little too late.

I'm not saying they will fail. Of established players they are the strongest and making the boldest moves so they have a chance at being a no 2.

But they launch when Netflix has 150 million subscribers. They almost saturated the US market and are quickly devouring international.

Taking market share from a dominant competitor is almost impossible.

If Bob Iger wasn't asleep at the wheel, just like the rest of the industry, Disney would have launched a competitor when Netflix had 10 million US-only customers.

They had a chance then but not now, competing against Netflix's 150 million subscribers and asymmetrical warfare from Amazon.