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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

All the old Disney back catalog is still new to my kids so they just watch that and ignore the new junk.

It depends on the age of the kids—for the price of a Disney+ subscription you can buy ~2 DVDs a month, which at my kid's age (4 and 2) is way more frequently than they actually want to watch new movies. When I was a kid, (and I'm seeing it with my own kids) we had a tiny selection of movies that we loved to watch repeatedly. Why pay rent for that selection when you could own it for the same price?

I may do something like this if Disney ever creates good content again on accident.

I bought puss and boots 2 last year on release, and that movie was excellent.

Is that true for all kids? I thought popular opinion was that all new gen kids have insatiable content appetites with low attention spans demanding constant newness?

Or is that just what the content producers want you to believe in order to get you to sign up the the latest streaming service?

If you feed them a constant stream of new content, yeah, they'll probably be that way, but they're not born with an insatiable desire for novel consumption.

Well maybe not everyone, but most of us are born with some level of Novelty Seeking [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking

I don't think that's a good argument. You find "new" when rewatching. The moment is not engaging anymore, it means you drained the entirety of the content

I think it depends on the person. Other than a few favorites, I've never tended to rewatch movies, reread books, replay games, etc. I think that a lot of it may be that a lot of the appeal to me is in "figuring out" the content so that once I know how things play out I don't care all that much about reexperiencing the playing out itself.

I imagine this greatly depends on the age of the kids and their immediate friend groups. A very young child generally isn't going to care or even understand some movie or show is old or not, everything in life is new to them.

You create your own monsters. my 2 years old must have watched the mario movie 200 times at least. I was like him, I watched Aladdin 200 times.

My 4 year old has had unlimited access to most services since 2. Mostly what she does is watches the same 10ish hours of content whatever that is for about a month. And then she picks another 10 hours. This 10 hours may or may not include things from previous 10 hour binges.

Kids like repetition. They are perfectly willing to watch the same season of something over and over again even when they could technically choose to watch something brand new

Important point about relative novelty, but kids aren’t subscribers / account holders / bill payers, so I can see how the population with children can become a persistent subscriber base, but growth requirements necessitate either more children (joking) or providing better content.

It’s pretty interesting to think about how technology and scalability play into the costs of the streaming model. Netflix’s engineering capabilities are well respected, I find it hard for another company to replicate this success without using better technology to offer the same service: do we know the technological infrastructure quality of Disney+ or Hulu? Have they encountered costly scaling problems that eat into budgets?

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