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Comment by futhey | Hacker News Reader

Likely a calculation of break-even with lost licensing revenue. The Disney+ adventure is a risk because you're foregoing easy licensing money for hard product money, and gambling that it'll be worth it.

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Above all, Disney+ is an attempt to reclaim the massive royalties Disney was reaping from every cable subscription that carried ESPN. Almost a quarter of The Walt Disney Company's revenue originated from ESPN in 2015-ish (which was the last time I looked), making it neck-and-neck with Parks and Resorts for Disney's most valuable business unit. Cord-cutting was a serious risk to them then and I'm sure they've only felt the sting more over the last five years.

Ding ding ding, I think this is the only way how this kind of calculation makes any sense at all: they are expecting Disney+ to replace all the cable revenue they lost, and until then, it's not "break even".

Because it sure as hell is not the opportunity costs of having their content on their own streaming service. Like Toy Story 4 released months ago, did a billion in cinema, but they still won't have it on Disney+ until.. somewhere in 2020. Their version of "betting the company" is "all the stuff you used to have on Netflix, but now you are paying extra".

If ESPN is what people want to pay for, why can't they just jack up the price of ESPN instead of making Disney+?

ESPN is not what people want to pay for. Nearly every cable subscription included ESPN, and core cutting has greatly cut ESPN revenue.

Disney was (and presumably still is) collecting tens of dollars per month for every cable subscription that has access to ESPN (the number I remember reading was something like $23 but that may be incorrect). Since ESPN is included in most cable subscriptions, virtually every cable subscription cancelled is an immediate revenue loss for TWDC.

I think the traditional media companies will be happy enough if all of the streaming companies fail due to fragmentation and they can ramrod cable back down everyone's throats. Even a streaming failure might be a win for traditional media companies. It might even be the biggest win, honestly. I don't know, but it seems like there was more money in traditional media than in streaming. The brief point in time where everyone was paying for both was probably ideal. But now that a sizable portion of the population have cut out $100+ cable bills (plus cable ads) in favor of 1-3 $10 streaming subscriptions (without ads) makes it seem like traditional media was way more profitable.

Honestly, I want it to be more like Music. I can choose whichever streaming music company I want and get 99.9% of the same music, because they have standard fees they pay each other, etc.

Streaming Video is incredibly fragmented. It's honestly frustrating. I don't want to subscribe to 5 services. I currently have Hulu+Live, and it has ESPN, and lots of other channels I like, but doesn't have the local Fox station, or the local ABC station (only the national fox news and abc news).

Excessive Fragmentation is going to cause everyone to go back to pirating stuff, like they did before Netflix made it too cheap and easy to bother.

That may be because it's far more expensive to make one consumer-hour of TV/movie content than 1 consumer-hour of music content.

Having your show streamed on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+ and others at the same time would make you more money than having it streamed only on your single service.

They are all playing to kill Netflix and other competition so they can establish monopoly like they had on cable.

I bought an HD antenna that gave me roughly 20 local channels with crystal clear picture and no buffering for $28 - no subscription. I'd highly recommend it for cord cutters to augment their streaming with local news and sports on national tv (world series, super bowl, sunday night football, etc).

If you live in a metro area with good signal, you can actually use a metal paperclip as a functional antenna. I picked up over 20 channels this way, no extra antenna needed.

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