Disney surpasses Netflix in global paid streaming subscribers
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Still an impressive achievement given how relatively new the service is, though. It's a testament to what a well oiled machine Disney is and their ability to pivot into new services.
I suppose I should disclaim that I used to work there :)
The fact that you're counted several times is a relevant complaint about their published subscriber count; the fact that you don't give money directly to them isn't.
Your slice of what is relevant might not be someone elses.
Disney will only being paid for stuff that's an add-on to a plan - and even then, they'll probably only get half the revenue.
This is untrue[1] and also just not how these deals work. Verizon is paying Disney when bundling. It may or may not be full price.
1. https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/02/02/verizons-disney-pa...
But yeah if they are counting people like me and not Daily Active Users across platforms they are foolish.
This question from a kid made me realize how much of an entertainment empire and revenue generator Disney is versus Netflix.
With Netflix, buying the monthly streaming service is the most you’ll spend. With Disney, it’s likely the least: the toys (with Disney royalties), the movie tickets for the family and finally - for some - a Disneyland trip where we dropped more over a few days than my lifetime Netflix spending will be.
The amount of investment that went into making Disney what it is today is incredible, and Netflix has a lot of catching up to do.
Will there ever be a ‘Netflixland’? Does Netflix even want to compete with Disney, head-on-head?
The only problem now, is the park isn't big enough! Imagine the amount of money a third park in America would make. (And cost)
Who wouldn’t want to visit upside-down land?
Content is now king and all of the other production companies have been making content for decades, Netflix is in serious trouble if it doesn’t lift its game.
Netflix has new stuff but it gets old faster.
You're correct that any streaming service has a chance at providing a show I'd like. That's the problem for services at the moment. Netflix has a huge catalogue but I've watched the shows I like. Disney has a smaller catalogue but happens to have a show I can watch with my wife. So that's the one we like at the moment.
They don't differentiate on anything else for me. They both work well enough. That said Disney is not on my spart TV so I have to use the Chromecast.
Solution: Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) licensing. Disney must set a price for a piece of content and then allow any distributor to pay that price to carry it. They must not advantage their own distribution service in any way (which they shouldn't be allowed to have in any case).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...
However I note on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic.... that the decree has just been sunset with the reasoning that ""the antitrust restriction was no longer necessary as the old model could never be recreated in contemporary settings"" - but it seems really like the exact same model,
Theaters take tons of staff and logistics to operate. A streaming service is comparably simple (once the initial system is setup) and can deploy all content to all customers within seconds with the efforts of minimal people and overhead.
There is no barrier to distribution these days. The only limitation is quality of content. If a content creator makes something good enough at a price point people will accept, then customers can easily pay it.
No one is walled in now. If a content producer in Tajikistan made something that blew everyone away, everyone can watch it around the world without having to go through the bosses at Disney and Comcast and Netflix.
By and large, people like their curators. For example, I have no interest in sifting through content to see if it is worth watching or not. So I let my sources mention a show or movie’s name a bunch of times before I decide to watch it.
Others depend on the fact that it u in a on Disney or Netflix or Apple TV to be the filtering mechanism. Others do not mind wading through YouTube or TikTok filth.
The power is in the consumer’s hands.
The important thing is that it can get in front of everyone. Which the internet enables very easily.
If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
The distributor is irrelevant nowadays. Today, Disney’s role is to curate.
Again, that's laughable nonsense. If I want to stream a Marvel movie, Netflix' curation is irrelevant, because you can ONLY find it on Disney. That's not curation, that's distribution.
> If the content is high quality, word will spread, people will share links to it, and everyone will have the opportunity to see it. This was not the case before the internet.
This isn't true - Rocky Horror Picture Show? That's the just the first one that comes to mind. There are so many cult classics from the 60s-80s.
> There are 8B people in the world, there is no way everyone has time to watch everything. There will be a filtering mechanism for everyone.
Right now it's whoever owns the exclusive license for a piece of content. That's my entire point - consumers aren't choosing the winners, content owners are.
I still put up with listening to Joe Buck call the World Series because Fox has exclusive rights to the broadcast. I would pay money to hear just about anyone else call it, including an ML powered Vin Scullybot (RIP).
Alas, I cannot, for a lack of FRAND licensing.
MLB choose to give Fox exclusive rights, and Fox chose to give exclusive announcing to Joe Buck. Ideally, you could just go to MLB.com and choose whichever announcer you want, or some other equivalent system.
I would lean towards MLB having the right to sell their games how they want, but they also benefit from taxpayer funded stadiums, so I would not mind the government being able to force certain terms like FRAND on them.
Would a carpenter be able to only distribute their furniture directly to their customer? A hotel be not be able to exclusively take reservations from their hotel guests? An independent videographer not be able to sell their own videos however they want?
I think the solution here is to reduce copyright to 10 years. Or maybe 15. Then there is no more “exclusive” distribution.
The solution is to mandate non discriminatory licensing, everything else you suggested is a workaround to avoid that step.
For some reason* everyone seems to think monopolism was this quaint thing of the past, and not the thing that every market everywhere sprints towards as fast as the technology of the era will allow without some kind of restraint or regulation.
(*"deeply motivated ideological reasoning")
They really had every possible advantage, and then instead re-built trash TV.
But technology advanced fast and if your differentiator is tech you’d better watch out.
I’d say if your differentiator is tech, also sell the tech.
The next season they outsourced to MLBAM and it was flawless.
And would you know it. Disney bought MLBAM.
Although now there are several content producers who can match up with Netflix, with their in house teams.
What I will never understand though was Netflix voluntarily choosing to eliminate the tremendous data collection operation they had in their rating system. One of Amazon's biggest advantages are the reviews. Netflix had that in the media space. They decided to throw it away for a system which has no user input (so no moat) where anything that is presented to you is invariably rated 99%. It makes absolutely no sense.
Now they give me some stupid thumbs-up/-down thing, and I just give them the finger in response. Ratings on Netflix are useless now.
I do have one huge bit of praise for them: the cancellation process was absolutely painless. Not being snarky, I really appreciated that! (Contrast with trying to cancel SiriusXM, or Spectrum Internet; both painful)
After finally convincing them that yes, I really did want to cancel, I was about to hang up and decided to double check that my auto-pay billing would be cancelled too.
"Oh no, if you're enrolled in auto-pay, you have to call the billing department to stop that."
I was so angry I nearly lost my composure with the lady on the phone who clearly wasn't responsible for such an asinine setup. I wonder how many people got charged for services never rendered and didn't want to deal with their bullshit enough to fight for a refund because they didn't know they had to cancel that separately.
I imagine Netflix has a really good grasp of the content landscape and is playing a bit of moneyball with that. Sure, reality TV is not everyone's cup of tea, but it may have a larger audience:budget ratio than other projects, thus being an important asset in a content portfolio. Let's not forget the Bridgerton's and shows of the like, whose appeal probably inversely correlate with that of Star Wars for a particular viewer, in aggregate.
I think an analogy to the gaming sphere is apt. You are not going to sell RTS's to people who play visual novels. And furthermore, in the MMO arena, there is also the dichotomy between those who play the game at a leisurely pace and those who consume end-game content as if it's their job. All of these different segments exist, yet how best to allocate resources among them is the true question. I do think disregarding a niche would be a mistake if one is truly chasing growth but it is also a balancing act. Essentially, Netflix is Steam, but forced to take on a much larger publisher role.
https://www.axios.com/pro/media-deals/2022/08/10/disneys-str...
Well, wrong target I guess. Disney has always been the big player in this space.
Some of this is not realizing just how much technology has advanced since Netflix was first mover - second mover often has much less problems in the area (especially as someone has already done the heavy work of showing it can be done).
Every time I see a show on a streaming service that I can't actually click on and watch I return to the high seas and with Sonarr/emby.
Too little too late.
They got utterly routed by Disney.
So what? Very nearly every successful business in the history of the world has had fewer customers than Netflix.
They could have had it all.
Every company wants to grow as big as it can. Netflix could have been the total entertainment package and had near monopoly power.
They played their cards wrong, and now their incredible growth story looks to be at an end. They're going to be bumping up against the HBOs of the world, meanwhile Disney will leapfrog them and grow into what Netflix wanted to be.
Your kids will be buying Star Wars merch and games and demanding to go to Disney World. Every house needs the Mouse, but Netflix is just another Paramount+.
At this point even Amazon and Apple will steal eyeballs and make Netflix's product look less appealing and less worth the cost.
Disney is what Netflix wanted to become. Now they have to fight for a smaller, more humble market. They're boxed in. Nobody will fund a bigger vision. The big dream is dead.
Long DIS. Short NFLX.
That "gaming" might be considered by some to be basic co-marketing and business development (which Netflix does too, of course). You've hit on a crucial point, though — Disney has an order of magnitude more relationships, subsidiaries, products, etc. to leverage than Netflix does. By 2025, Netflix will have been acquired by someone who can compete with that.
Chicago Librarians
Chicago Janitors
Chicago City Planers
I mean, I could go on...
COVID theatrical closures made it look like they were fundamentally doing very well. If that factor is removed, the current strategic headwinds facing them would have been apparent much earlier.
Netflix could try pay-per-view instead of or in addition to the ads model. TVOD is a very small segment of total entertainment industry's streaming revenues and obscured largely by the success of SVOD driven by Netflix's trailblazing past and AVOD/FAST adoption by competition.
It may become the Blockbuster rental of the 21st century for the long-tail of videos, the business model they disrupted with their arrival.
Amazon Prime Videos is doing some of that (and so is YT and others).
But there is room for Netflix to innovate here to capture even the blockbusters (i.e., the fat part before the long tail).
(Theatrical | Direct to stream) -> NFLX Pay-per-view TVOD catalog -> NFLX SVOD catalog + NFLX AVOD catalog.
They could potentially sign up deals with theatres (and include technology) for special screenings reserved for the NFLX pay-per-view customers to watch the film on the large screen.
Some cannibalization of SVOD revenues will happen. But it would also force their competitors to play by the new rules instead of NFLX being totally reactive as they are finding themselves now.
Amazon, HBO Max, maybe Discovery+, make enough content for streaming in enough quantity (so there’s enough higher quality stuff) that Apple TV can’t easily surpass them.
Some shows are basically streaming shows now any way even if they technically go on HBO at 11 pm or something (thinking of something like Nathan Fielder’s own show and the show he exec produces).
OTOH, when every one else has gone to at least $10 even with ads, then yeah $5 for Apple TV is crazy cheap. Though a ton of people have Amazon Prime and it doesn’t appear to get talked about too much or be a major deal for Amazon. They’re sinking a good amount of money into it too (thinking LOTR show and MGM $8B acquisition).
Netflix specifically has gotten a particularly bad reputation on HN in recent years. The number of comments relentlessly shitting on it have gone up a lot. Much like Apple TV’s general rep on HN is usually neutral/on the outside or positive.
I cancelled my Netflix but Disney Plus is just worth keeping, even with the price hike coming.
Netflix is just simply massively overpriced now, in my opinion, even before you dive into the massive content advantage Disney have - almost everything ever made by Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic and the then the massive Star catalogue, which actually has a ton of decent movies and tv shows, new and old. Content is obviously highly subjective, but I lost track of the amount of times I’d open Netflix and spend 10 minutes struggling to find something worth watching in their annoying UI.
But from this year, Disney lost the rights for ipl streaming. And numbers should come down..
gz to disney plus team
It's not exactly news for nerds nor is it news for investors - there are plenty of other sources.
This article is an advert (try scrolling down) and wankery and very boring. "Why it matters" is pure comedy.