What? Disney+ surpassed Netflix in subscribers.
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/10/disney-surpasses-netflix-gl...
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/10/disney-surpasses-netflix-gl...
> in India they have hotstar as a property which shows live sports and is huge
On the other hand, Disney did lose the rights to stream Indian Premier League https://www.wsj.com/articles/disney-wins-tv-rights-loses-str...
Disney+ is huge, and it got there so fast. It's absolutely dizzying to think how fast they are going to blow past Netflix with Disney+ alone.
It must be stressful to be in leadership at Netflix right now. How do you compete? More Chaos Monkeys? It's clear the differentiator is no longer engineering but IP.
That's been obvious for a very long time. It's why stuff like Stranger Things exists and is being milked. NF leadership have been playing that game for a long time now, they knew the time of reckoning would come; the question is whether they managed to build enough defences to resist the predicted storm and stay afloat in the long term.
Well. No surprise given how much buy-ups and mergers the regulators tolerated... Out of the list for popular franchises, Disney owns the top two (MCU/26 B$, Star Wars/10 B$) and has significant involvement in the third place (Spider-Man). Additionally, they own Avatar (which is the most profitable movie ever made), The Simpsons, Indiana Jones, the entire catalog of Pixar, the entire classic and re-made OG Disney IP and a ton of other stuff [1].
Of the really popular stuff, the only things Disney doesn't own are Harry Potter (which is a complicated dumpster fire not just given the tendency of JKR to set her own life work ablaze, but also IP-rights-wise [2]), the DC Universe (which hasn't managed to stay even close to competitive with MCU), Star Trek (which went off Netflix to Paramount+) and James Bond.
The future of entertainment is scary - Disney needs to be broken up, or the government needs to step in and mandate that copyright holders have to provide fair and equal streaming rights to everyone, similar to the music industry (which managed to get the hint on its own, and now there's more than healthy competition in the market with OG Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Tidal and a boatload of smaller ones).
[1] https://ifilmthings.com/disney-owns/
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/16/22770469/harry-potter-st...
Should new Star Wars be a big part of what I watch? I enjoy them, but I'm undecided.
MCU just feels like rubbish, but it prints money for reasons I just can't figure out.
In contrast, the MCU is the perfect execution of "how to make a movie out of a boatload of source material". IMHO, them sticking to the lore well enough that the die-hard nerds don't have much to whine was the key decision that made the MCU what it is... but now that the MCU has gotten so absurdly large, it's going to be interesting if they can keep up with that attention to detail.
Disney+ sure, but Disney is the Goliath in entertainment and has been around for close to 100 years!
I think the lesson is that it is easy to have great growth numbers when you give your service away, loose billions, and triple count subscribers.
Disney has more subscriptions than Netflix, when you add together the streaming services they offer. ("Subscribers" implies people, but that's much harder to count accurately.)
False.
Disney+, Hulu, Hotstar, and ESPN combined.