Disney and the Great Streaming Purge | Hacker News Reader

Disney and the Great Streaming Purge

puck.news

14 pointsmacleginn16 comments

>> If Wall Street wants Disney+ to cost less, the easiest way to do that without impacting subs or engagement is to delete the old stuff nobody watches.

This seems bananas on its face, are the execs at Disney thinking that it will save money to have fewer titles available to stream? The storage costs of titles that are never delivered is near zero.

I believe it's the residual licensing costs to the works that are the expense, not the physical storage of it.

Residuals, while part of the industry is striking & more dependent on residuals.

Can't read without paying, won't pay $13/mo to read. OP, do you subscribe, can you tell us why?

Ah, the price of Disney Plus... Can't wait for another $13 subscription, which the article seems to be complaining about.

Would you pay $1 to read it? Not an ongoing subscription, but a license to read the article.

For this article, from this source? Nah. Never heard of them before and the content isn't that interesting.

These look like non-paywalled articles that cover the same thing:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/19/23729642/disney-plus-hulu...

> If there’s a show on Disney Plus or Hulu that you’ve been meaning to watch then you might want to do so quickly before it is pulled from the platforms for good. According to a report by Deadline, Disney is about to remove dozens of series (and a few films) from both streaming services, including Willow, Y: The Last Man, and Turner & Hooch, as part of the entertainment giant’s broader cost-cutting measures.

https://www.vulture.com/2023/05/disney-plus-hulu-to-remove-s...

> A Disney rep has confirmed to us but declined to comment further that both of the Walt Disney Company–owned streamers will be removing a handful of titles from their services as soon as next week on May 26. Titles such as Willow, Dollface, FX’s Pistol and Y: The Last Man are among the first round of shows to be pulled, they confirmed. Disney+’s Howard was initially reported to be pulled, but a Disney rep clarified to us that it was never meant to be taken off the platform. In all, it’s expected that the the final number of titles pulled from Disney+ and Hulu will be a bit under 100, per a source familiar with the plans.

https://deadline.com/2023/05/disney-remove-series-streaming-...

> The titles, which are being removed from Disney’s streaming services globally, include Disney+’s Willow, Big Shot, Turner & Hooch, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, Just Beyond, Diary of a Future President, The Mysterious Benedict Society and The World According to Jeff Goldblum and Hulu’s Y: The Last Man, Dollface, The Hot Zone, Maggie, Pistol and Little Demon. A number of Freeform series also are slated to leave Hulu.

https://thedirect.com/article/disney-plus-shows-removal

This clarifies some of the names I recognized )like Willow and Turner & Hooch) are recent streaming reboots, not the original movies.

Some of those are very recent titles, like The Mysterious Benedict Society, which finished it's 3rd season within the past few months.

This may shed some light on their thinking: https://collider.com/disney-plus-hulu-content-purge/:

> Unfortunately, Disney is preparing to make many movies and TV shows inaccessible. During the meeting, CFO Christine McCarthy says the company “will be removing certain content from our streaming platforms and currently expect to take an impairment charge of approximately $1.5 to $1.8 billion.” An impairment charge is used by a company to get rid of unprofitable products, taking them out of the market for good. It’s a process similar to what Warner Bros. Discovery did with Batgirl and other Max productions, which risk never being available to the public. So, while the strategy might make sense for executives that ignore the artistic value of films and TV shows, the content purge means many productions could be lost forever.

IIRC, Batgirl was a fully completed movie that was figuratively destroyed to take a tax write-off.

https://archive.is/fZ0dE

Seems incomplete as well. Or is that the whole article?

Never mind, this still seems to cut off near the same place as the paywalled version.

I just flagged it and moved on, after spending more minutes trying to read TFA than the blogspam was worth. Disney's purging content, "profits", blah, blah, blah, we've already read this; bring something new to the table above the fold before asking me to sign up for something.

Yeah, that site seems to be for a particular type of person. Perhaps someone that wishes to be an "influencer"

Cool paywall bro

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