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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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