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Comment by kenhwang | Hacker News Reader

How Disney and Netflix run their streaming services and their strategy for them couldn't be more different. Disney+ was always supposed to be a poison pill for the industry, everyone will try to compete against it and bleed out money perpetually.

Other way to think about it: to Netflix, streaming and content is the product. To Disney (especially with the promotion of Chapek over Mayer), it's just a marketing expense for Disneyland.

However, COVID really threw a wrench in that strategy. So it's going to be interesting to see how they attempt to pivot now that shareholders expect it to be the future of the company, whereas internally its literally a ghost town built by the lowest bid contractor.

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To Disney (especially with the promotion of Chapek over Mayer), it's just a marketing expense for Disneyland.

I think a better way to say this is that Netflix is in the content business, but Disney is in the intellectual property business. The parks are just one aspect of that difference, and Disney’s by necessity is a long-term strategy.

To put it another way, Baby Yoda alone is going to be making more money for Disney 20 years from now than Netflix’s entire 2020 slate of programming will be for them.

Then why can't I easily purchase a Disney+ subscription? The main thing I don't understand why, as a Canadian aboding in Cyprus, I see: "Sorry, Disney+ is not available in your region" instead of a call for a credit card number and email address.

It's an EU country! You know what Netflix shows me on an incognito browser?

"Unlimited movies, TV shows, and more. Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime."

It's 2021 and the internet has been around long enough. How is the company this poorly managed?

In fairness it took Netflix a long time to grow internationally. I waited years for it to come to Israel. Disney+ hasn’t been around nearly as long. International viewing rights agreements are complicated.

Surely they are simpler for Disney though?

I'd gaurantee that Disney + still has to license its content internally off the disney IP/Licensing arm.

Indeed, figuring out exactly what is available where on Disney Plus could fill several Reddit forums...

Not hugely.

Disney and Fox have a huge amount of legacy agreements, running for a decade or more.

Can't drive to a Disneyland from Cyprus, duh. No point marketing to people who are unlikely to buy the profit making product.

Serious answer, probably just lack of launch partner or people on the ground to help Disney navigate the local laws and distribution (which may include plopping down some servers in a data center).

Funny thing is Disney+ is available in south east asia via Hotstar for ~$10 a year with some deals from mobile carriers. I'm not really sure how they made money with that pricing.

> So it's going to be interesting to see how they attempt to pivot now that shareholders expect it to be the future of the company, whereas internally its literally a ghost town built by the lowest bid contractor.

I think it's pretty clear from their last shareholder news release. 18,000 Star Wars expanded universe spin off series & movie trilogies, coming right up! Not that I'm really complaining :o)

Disney always knew how to produce content, so producing more content isn't unexpected. Since this is HN, I'm more interested in how they'll scale their engineering systems.

On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.

Then you have Disney with makeshift off-the-shelf solutions assembled and aligned by multiple siloed armies of overseas contractors that rotate out every year as their contracts expire and some very expensive vendors.

Money affords a certain amount of incompetence.. Disney has nearly $20 billion cash on the balance sheet. Their product might never be as well designed and efficient as Netflix's (and I very much enjoy the Netflix technical blogs that lay out the complicated engineering to shave ms off of latency and compress things 1% better) but they don't really need to be if they have Pixar + Star Wars + Marvel + the Disney Vault and a streaming service that works well enough to launch those titles.

I don't have a Disney+ account. Is there much difference as far as the user is concerned?

Technically it feels the same to me. Content-wise netflix is kind of a dumpster buffet, with a tons of meh stuff and a couple of really nice things. Disney has less content, but almost no low quality fluff.

>almost no low quality fluff.

Doesn't Disney own star wars nowadays. Is that sequel-mill of terrible writing really what passes for quality?

Yes. Where ‘quality’ just means halfway decent original programming that I can stand to watch for a half hour or so. I am having trouble finding that ‘quality’ on Netflix lately, for example.

The Mandalorian is far from perfect, but it has some excellent episodes and is based in a robust understanding of Star Wars.

I have many qualms about The Mandalorian, but compared to the dumpster fire called the "sequel trilogy" it's very good content.

You don't have to enjoy it for it to be good to someone

Regardless how you feel about the sequels, they are masterpieces next to endless stream of Netflix B-rate titles.

Even tho Disney+ isn’t available to me in Singapore. Looking via a VPN there wasn’t anything I wanted to watch? While Netflix has tons of stuff me and the wife watch together.

Each to their own!

Is isn't all high quality Blockbuster content in the Disney back catalog and that is reflected on Disney+.

However I would agree it's seems better so far than Netflix which aims somewhat more on quantity over quality.

Regions probably vary.

> Disney has less content, but almost no low quality fluff.

I mean, if you count all the content they own and you already saw before on cinema or other medias then you're right.

But after paying 1.5 years for Disney+ I think I'm paying 120 dollars a year just to watch Baby Yoda. I cannot find any other content over there really worth the Disney+ membership price.

On the other hand it's really hard for me to decide what to watch on netflix because of the amount of content I'm interested.

I thought that too until one day I noticed that Disney has the National Geographic content as well. I've been watching a good amount of that recently.

I wouldn't pay for Disney+ on its own, but getting it as part of a bundle with Hulu (ad free) was ok. ESPN+ is worthless.

The television content is mixed on Disney+ It’s for children so I may not have the best perspective but most of it is kind of weak. The marvel is star wars stuff is strong and they have the Disney movies, including the n-th straight to video sequels you never heard of.

> I mean, if you count all the content they own and you already saw before on cinema or other medias then you're right.

If you don't count that then Disney+ probably isn't for you. It's ideal for parents who want a bunch of good kids movies and shows. Mandalorian, although it was the "killer app" is an outlier. The rest of the original content I've watched on there is almost literally advertisements for Disneyland. Just buy a membership for a month and watch Mando.

I thought Mandalorian was the definition of low quality fluff personally. Only saw season 1. Weakly designed fight scenes, several filler episodes with pretty poor plots (most egregiously the prison one), and my personal least favorite, the super ai droid that 360 no scopes everybody, dual wielding pistols. I've asked a few times why people thought it was good and most often the answer is Baby Yoda (on HN).

shrug. ymmv

The main difference is Disney+ leans towards a younger audience.

Disney acquihired bamtech to run DSS. My understanding is that it's not a full contractor house as described here, though I don't have insight into the contractor:fte ratio.

Disclaimer: work at Hulu, opinions are my own

> On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.

I don't really think users will care at all about this, though. They just want high quality content. The users and the their dollars will flock to the high quality content.

Netflix is feeling like H&M "fast fashion" where they churn out a bazillion low quality shows to throw everything against the wall and hope something sticks to keep people subscribing.

Meanwhile the entire field is getting diluted by other platforms popping up and customers are getting fatigued enough to pay for premium content only (HBO/Disney/ESPN) and then pirate everything else, imo.

I think the technical quality does matter though. Everyday people may not care about how "cool" the Netflix engineering is, but they certainly care about the end product.

For example, over the holidays I watched 3 different streaming platforms:

BBC iPlayer - occasionally cut out and dropped back to main menu requiring me to find the program again.

Amazon Prime - often had buffering problems requiring me to manually lower resolution (on a 150Mb/s connection...)

Netflix - No problems, hit start on a movie and watch it to the end.

This kind of thing does get remembered; I certainly ended up watching a heck of a lot more Netflix than any other platform.

Quality content is important, and lack of it is a reason to quit a service for sure.

I haven't had any issues with the service of Disney+, so they're at least doing good enough (on my devices, on my home network).

On the other side of the spectrum, Apple TV on my devices takes about 8 attempts to start a stream, including a reboot. They would have to have a big exclusive that I really wanted to see for me to use that again.

Smallish differences in how long it takes to get a stream started (including browse/search time) probably drive long term behavior, when content quality is similar enough though; because I'll tend to use the service that gets me into watching something I'll enjoy sooner; and when the same content is available on multiple services, I use the one that's faster to get started.

>On one end, you have Netflix practically leading the field with the best of the best engineers and practices.

They may have the best engineers but content wise all I hear are complaints. Mediocre shows and cancelling shows after one season if specific metrics aren't good enough. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I wouldn't complain if even one of the spin offs would be from the KOTOR universe. But I guess it's not canon anymore.

I'm not sure this is really true, because ultimately Netflix is also a poison pill bleeding money perpetually.

Netflix loses money and is still funded by considerable debt, ever year. Streaming and content aren't so much the product, the subscriber number is the product and what shareholders continue to tolerate more cash burn for. Netflix will, if it ever hopes to become cash positive, probably have to diversify into other forms of IP exploitation, because otherwise it is hard to see how. They are unlikely to be able to radically increase revenue (though they will absolutely do what they can to increase ARPU with price rises and higher tiers). They are pretty much tapping out in subscriber growth without significant increases in content spend. They have significant competition and long tail content generally performs badly, so they won't be able to reduce spend much.

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