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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I am convinced the pricing is all deflated to jockey for dominance and then they’ll start raising them.

I pay $6.60USD per month for Disney+. No way that’s their par pricing. Why would I ever buy my kids a Disney DVD or blu ray?

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So, $80 a year. How much did you spend on Disney before? (And how much was left for Disney after everyone on the way had their cut taken).

A whole hell of a lot more. Not just for Star Wars but for all the Disney and Pixar stuff for my boys.

Your revision makes the point a bit better. They’ve cut out the store. Manufacturer. Etc. So that’s a win win.

Doesn’t mean Disney is happy sharing the profits with me.

Digital distribution costs are much lower than physical distribution. And toys are still being sold, maybe even more, as your kids watch more stuff. They could make their whole catalog free and still have a very profitable toy/parks business out of it.

To your point, they've done that previously.

Originally, the Disney channel was a premium subscription channel. They started transitioning to basic cable bundling in 1990-91.

Streaming rentals are $3-$5 and Disney definitely doesn't come out with enough content I'm interested in watching (much less re-watching) each year to justify the service even at its current price. I suppose it might seem like a more reasonable value if you have kids, re-watch a lot of their older stuff, or actually care about any of their TV shows. But I'm not sure how much further they can really push it with their current offerings.

> I suppose it might seem like a more reasonable value if you have kids

I'd be surprised if their strategy involved going after anyone BUT families with kids.

Disney+ has the entire star wars catalog, which I'm told some grownups like

It's in awful 16:9, but the whole Simpsons back catalogue is enough to justify what I pay them.

They have added the option to switch back to 4:3 recently.

I paid $9CDN for disney+ last month. watched two episodes of The Simpsons. that's $9 more than i otherwise would have paid disney.

They don't need to get more money out of everybody if they can get more customers.

I want to believe that volume savings will be passed to us. But I’m just not convinced. They can smell money being left on the table. They’ll charge us whatever we will pay. I think we will generally tolerate paying more.

Unlike other streaming services, Disney owns the content (nearly 100 years worth of movies and shows). Their main cost is probably the infrastructure to stream the bytes to the customer. And they have like 55 million subscribers. I think they are going to make a lot of money.

nearly 100 years worth of movies and shows

This is a truly sickening failure of our copyright laws.

Even if they just break even on this (or lose money), they'll still come up ahead compared to companies like Netflix. For the last decade or more Disney movies and TV shows have been vessels to sell merchandise and park tickets.

I think people are underestimating the Disney+ value prop. The back-catalog is absolutely phenomenal - the right mix of nostalgia and pop culture. The Mandalorian was one of the best shows I have seen lately - technical magic and very entertaining. I don't think any Netflix franchise comes close to matching Disney's top 3 (Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar stuff), and Disney will probably milk all of it for the foreseeable future. They have the talent to keep it from going stale.

I suspect Netflix will continue to dominate the adult/indie streaming scene while Disney will get a majority of the pop culture market. And pop culture sells in the physical world as well.

I just cancelled / paused Disney after having it for the last 4 or 5 months. My kid watched a bunch of shows and movies at first, but barely anything in the past couple months. Maybe we'll get it again in a few months or a year.

I feel like lots of the small/niche services are going to see their subscribers doing the same.

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