What I don't understand is how e.g. Disney+ is losing so much money. It's Disney's content, has an enormous userbase, and somehow is bleeding billions?
That is partly the problem. You spend hundreds of millions to make blockbuster movies and then release it on Disney+ in a few months for free (or sometimes directly). That costs money. Add to that over reliance on only Disney content creates two problems:
1. You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round.
2. You have to pay money to create content. Vs the ability to buy content for cheap or add it for a few months.
On top of that, Disney overseas also includes live sports in their packages which can get expensive.
If previously Disney made Daredevil and 'sold' it to Netflix for $1m (hypothetically), but now you're holding that back to stream yourself, you've got to account for that missing $1m somehow.
If Studio A was like "we'll give you a 10% cut of whatever we then license it for for streaming" and Disney was like "we're gonna stream it on our own platform for free, sorry" that's a negotiation problem for Disney. So selling internally at market rate is a good thing for relationships with external creators and partners.
There are also revenue share agreements that are involved with actors. That are still taken into accounts
> You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round
That’s not strictly true either for kids content. You can keep recycling content to kids for years and kids will rewatch the same thing.
Disney has been making money off the same animated content for over half a century. To a first approximation, no one cares about Netflix’s back catalog.
Furthermore, kids will complain if they lose access to frozen etc so disney+ has an exit cost. Like the admiral said, it's a trap!
People would care more, if Netflix would stop cancelling everything. I'm not sure they realize how much they're killing their own backcatalog revenue by making everything a one/two season max.
See here at 0:40ish: https://youtu.be/mR_Ui_3Iz2o
I can't stand many kid shows, but this one even I can love. It is incredible for me how Octonauts are not pretentious, like so many "science!" shows for kids are.
I'm looking at you Netflix and your lack of new seasons of Octonauts and Cat in the Hat :-)
And they keep pulling stuff down or putting stuff up. I don't need artificial scarcity, I want access, just as I want to listen to a song on Spotify when I really want to hear it without being told its no longer available with my subscription. I'm subscribing to the Disney library and most of the time half of it is unavailable.
I suspect that, in addition to ad-supported tiers, we'll see more annual subscriptions or at least subscriptions where annual is sufficiently cheaper on a monthly basis that it's essentially an offer a lot of people can't refuse.
I think they're already experimenting with things like that. I signed up for an annual subscription when Disney+ launched (I knew my wife and kid would love it) and when it came time to renew they offered a "Disney Drop Box" as a reward for signing up for another year. The box was a themed selection of Disney merchandise that they claimed was valued at ~$150, which is probably a stretch, but my kid loved it.
For our household, this is true of all streaming services. We rotate them, or subscribe for short stretches. For example, I got Paramount+ for a couple of months, watched all of the Star Trek content, and then cancelled. Amazon Prime is the exception (because free(-ish) shipping.)
I wonder to what extent the big streaming services are aware of this phenomenon and how they hope to mitigate it.
The services also know that the only thing they can do about this is release enough new content to keep users engaged, or bundle the subscription with other ones.
Obviously, we'd also need to have a few random catch-up blocks for older shows, maybe in the mid-afternoon. Perhaps we could even do it over the air wirelessly, with no ISPs involved.
Of all the competitors to Netflix, Pluto tv (owned by Paramount) is the most interesting.
Precisely because they built, and continue to optimize, their product around profit:user.
If they can get favorable licensing deals by broadcasting as linear programming... they do it.
If they can get good deals around on demand... they do it.
The end result seems to be that they have many more options to minimizing cost of licensing content, and therefore maximizing the amount of content they can offer a user, versus a pure-play on demand provider.
If Netflix added linear programming "channels", I'd buy their stock tomorrow.
I suspect that not many people do this.
It it becomes a problem, they can always bring back the old weekly episode model.
For instance, the original version of Disney's The Three Little Pigs has the wolf disguising himself as a stereotypical Jewish merchant.
Or, integrate a feedback system and take down complained-about cartoons quickly. That's probably better since sensitivities change and some perfectly fine items today might be off-limits tomorrow.
Doing nothing is not a great option, even if it's the easiest to implement.
Maybe they did, and that's why the cartoons aren't available? If you have to cut X% of a show for content, maybe they make the call to cut the show entirely and pretend it doesn't exist, just so they don't have to answer awkward questions about why so much of the show is missing.
What’s the convincing reason for Disney to not simply do nothing? Sell me on Disney digitizing and releasing old cartoons with the salary of at least one person versus doing absolutely nothing.
You also have to sell me on that employee working on the Donald Duck smoking cigars and speaking in a Mid-Atlantic accent archive project versus working on something else. Why is that employee not instead working on The Avengers Versus Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Hulk We Groot Again!”
A complete multi-generational back-catalog that is always available to stream.
Netflix’s irrevocable back-catalog can only go as far back as their first Netflix original. Everything else is licensed.
Netflix hasn’t needed much of a back catalog to out-earn the competition.
The truth is that back catalogs have the potential to be basically worthless except for a select few “best of the best” classics.
The majority of Disney back catalog content is most certainly not at the level of Snow White or Cinderella. I think about many of their package (anthology) films as a great example of near-unwatchable garbage that only has non-profit historical value.
Media companies quite literally let their back catalogs rot (like the neglect and disinvestment that led to the Universal masters fire of 20008).
I have to admit though that the rest of the year is used up by the kids watching cartoons on D+
Star Trek TOS was a very low budget affair, and produced excellent results, because they hired the best scifi writers. When they threw money at the Star Trek movies, they were all terrible.
It's the plot that matters. Nothing else.
I watched the La Brea show for a while. Lots of expensive special effects. But the dialog was just pablum. The characters each talked like they were the same person - using the same words and phrases. They behaved the same, too.
I expect the cost of a good writer is a pittance compared with the cost of the production.
Provably false by all the bad sequels which nonetheless made more money than the original¹. If plot were that crucial, movies would consist of a person sitting down reading a book, à la The Invention of Lying². Money matters to commercial success of a film above anything else.
¹ https://www.vox.com/2016/7/1/12070048/resurgence-independenc...
[1] I actually only showed them the first part so we could walk away enjoying it
Surprisingly similar to the old days of bugging my parents for the Disney channel (of course, didn't have on-demand selection back then).
Didn't Disney's CEO talk about getting to the point of having a movie release a day or something like that late last year? The quality might be questionable at that rate.
Somehow the branding has become severely distorted, so now these movies make me feel like the studio sees me as a barrier between them and my money.
If Disney can once again make me feel like they're producing content because it's what they love to do, and because they love how we enjoy it, then I'll go back to giving them my money.
With Star Wars, creators can ignore the tired Skywalker storyline, plus there's no genre expectations tying creators down (IMO sci-fi is not a genre so much as a meta-genre or motif). At least in theory--they've been pretty reluctant to spread their wings until recently.
Here let me get you caught up. Blue laser sword is good, red laser sword is bad.
I did enjoy the Mandalorian series because at least it had the comic relief of Grogu, if the rest was a bit of a slog.
As far as the jailbreak, I had trouble getting emotionally invested in the outcome, as I found Diego Luna's character to be one-dimensional. Again, the approach was simply shoot your way out.
Mandalorian reinvented the Western in the Star Wars universe.
Both are superb. The other Star Wars series are not.
The Mandalorian is Western + Ronin / Samurai.
And yes, they're both great.
It was truly excellent. For a complete surprise, do not watch Rogue One first.
I'm just going to throw this out there. What if these shows just aren't that good?
Now there is so much you need to pay attention or you'll miss it. People get sick of drinking out of a firehose.
There were four Star Wars series.
That's too much content.
Two movies a year that Marvel started with was perfect. It gave you tome to unwind, and get hungry for more.
What if they aren't that good in a very calculated, lowest-common-denominator way?
Any really big $$ production has to have really broad appeal to succeed. Maybe the safest way to do that is just to target some minimum threshold for ticket buying on a rainy thursday.
But I'm almost certainly completely wrong, and I'm sure they have tons of data justifying their investment in new content. I guess I'm biaised since I pay for Disney+ so that my little sister can use it, and original shows weren't important to my decision to subscribe at all.
This feels like it should be illegal. You're certainly paying for D+, and it's not as though Verizon competes in a free market.
If you need to be on Verizon's network, you could go to Visible or another MVNO. If not, there's ATT and T-Mo and all of their MVNOs as well.
But I don’t think I’ve ever streamed any of them other than maybe to show a friend who hadn’t seen them.
Don’t know why that is, but it’s weirdly true.
Where as on streaming you have find it, sit through 2 or 3 studio logos, and then 5-15 minutes of exposition that even in most good movies isn't that good.
Seems they've backed themselves into a corner
I consider myself an ardent Star Wars & Marvel fan and I just couldn't keep up anymore, so I axed Disney+.
Netflix still drops enough documentaries that I keep it around.
Contrast that with HBO Max that has never had a sale of any kind except for a single free trial week.
I also think that people underestimate the cost of serving streaming entertainment. It's very compute- and data-intensive. If you architect your systems badly, which I assume Disney did, you will be paying a LOT of money for this service.
And I think you could be right about D+ architecture, they went from zero to a streaming service very quickly.
Disney basically bought MLB's streaming service and used that for Disney Plus.
A company as big as Disney has to be able to look at its different subsidiaries and analyse how they're performing individually. So maybe Walt Disney Animation Studio spends money making movies and earns money selling the rights to those movies, and so Disney+ gets exclusive access to streaming rights, but it still has to pay for them.
Disney+ is also a very specific fan-oriented service. Don't like Star Wars or comic books? Not a child? Good luck finding something worth watching that isn't a documentary.
But yes, as a guy in his 30s, Disney+ provides nothing compelling to me. I do pay for Hulu though
FTFY.
A grandparents single account is used in the households of all their grandchildren.
I have a feeling it might be that they don't have enough established TV shows. But this is the problem of pretty much everyone but Netflix, and this will most likely change in the next 2-3 years.