Leaked Disney+ financials may shed light on recent price hike | Hacker News Reader

Leaked Disney+ financials may shed light on recent price hike

arstechnica.com

58 pointsmilanaross61 comments

This feels... grotesque? The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.

I think part of what explains that is that they aren't "competing" in sense of airing the same shows. It's the shows that get marketed, not streaming of generic entertainment.

You mean like Disney having a government enforced monopoly on their content that lasts for about a century, combined with changes in technology w.r.t streaming that allow them to never create a "first sale" and thus make it illegal for anybody to possess a copy of their content without paying them a monthly fee that they get to set?

All of this I think just serves to underscore the importance of piracy’s role in the debate — in a world where physical media isn’t rented or loaned out, piracy provides the needed pressure to keep rightsholders honest on price and terms.

That’s only the case if more people pirate, as it stands it’s not enough pressure to do much of anything.

Another way to say that first part is that after a certain amount of time the government strips away your control over your own creation.

Nobody is taking away your copy.

You say "your control" as if that current "certain amount of time" was not after you had already been dead for 70 years.

Yes, the copyright laws setup in the 18th century and since are all about protecting creator rights. But the other half of the equation is consumer rights. Consumer rights tend to get trodden down in the name of profit, so we now have the situation where you have to pay rent on your own cultural heritage. Or can't even do that, when creators or censors have removed or altered media that helped form your adolescent mind.

Yes. Is contributing your creation to society - something you live in and benefit from - something you don't like?

No, in the US the purpose of copyright is to incentivize creation of creative works for the long-term public benefit [1]. The rights to control what others do with your copyrighted works are a means to the end, a temporary price for future unexclusive public access. (The Copyright Clause gives Congress authority to pass copyright statutes, but the First Amendment theoretically "amends" the Copyright Clause and takes priority over any copyright statutes. In the US, fair use was a necessary common law measure made into statutory law to align copyright with the First Amendment.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

You only have that control because of the government. Without the chunk of the legal system devoted to it you wouldn't have any control of your own creation at all.

You can say the same thing about physical stuff.

The whole ownership concept is a mental construct, enforced by our government.

If I take your physical thing away you are left without that thing.

If I copy your thing you still have your thing.

While property ownership and restrictions on being able to say or write something are both constructs governments apply, they are very different principals

Ultimately they rely on same principle: this is mine. I made this, it's product of my work. It's mine to do as I please.

Government made laws to put this into practice.

Edit: Ultimately, to say you don't protect IP in some reasonable form is to say only work that produces physical stuff has value and is worth protecting. That all thinking is not a work worth protecting.

It's not like there weren't systems trying to make a different concept of material ownership. Communal ownership mean the thing is never yours in the first place. You never owned and thus it was never taken away. It mostly didn't work.

You could also just...not watch it.

You don't have a right to consume someone else's creations just because you want to.

Will the work be in the public domain after you die? Do they make more money per hour than you would make in a dozen lifetimes? Do they not currently offer the media? if you answer yes to at least two of these questions, then yes you do.

No, you can't not watch it.

Popular media becomes part of popular culture. Your culture, my culture. It surrounds us and affects us, no matter our choice and even before we are of an age we can legally make such decisions. Mickey Mouse is in your head, and Disney controls Mickey Mouse, so Disney controls a part of you. Owns a part of you. A part that you need to keep locked away and only used with permission, because that T-shirt that makes you feel happy for no good reason needs to be blurred out when filmed to avoid a court case. And Gen X is still pissed about it because Han shooting first is part of their identity.

I think it becomes less black and white once something becomes part of culture (in the sense that works like Beowulf, Macbeth, and The Arabian Nights are part of culture, not in the sense that every published work is part of culture). I think that people have a right to their culture and therefore have a right to interact with stories that become part of their culture.

Is this your stance on the creation of the datasets used for training of song-generating and image-generating models as well?

That's not even remotely related...

And my stance on the creation of AI training is that if they want to use someone else's IP, they can try to negotiate a license and pay for it what the creator/rightsholder wants for it.

And if they don't get a license, then they can do without.

Whenever there's something that looks like a market failure, there's almost always a governmental grant of monopoly privilege or some government regulation to prevent competition.

Why are prescription drugs unaffordable? Because of a grant of monopoly privilege called "patents" that allow a company to monopolize a drug for around 2 decades. Why is health care so expensive? Because the government subsidizes employer provided insurance through the tax code so nobody cares about controlling medical costs. Why is housing so expensive? Because local governments literally make it illegal to build housing infringing on the private property rights of landowners with idiotic "zoning" laws and by doing things like declaring run down parking lots to be "historic" parking lots that must be preserved. Why is the labor market so skewed against labor and in favor of capital? Because numerous government laws make it harder to start businesses than it should be and also because government subsidizes employers providing "benefits" through the tax code. Why did the railroads collapse and most of the US become dependent upon cars? Because the government regulated the railroads to death with the Interstate Commerce Commission and subsidized both cars and car infrastructure. You can keep going on and on with examples but the answer is almost always something that the government did to screw up the market.

While this can be the case, numerous of the examples you have given (medical costs and the labor market to name two) have fewer problems in countries with much stronger government intervention/regulation.

If your government creates poor regulations then maybe that should be tackled directly (by electing less incompetent/corrupt officials) rather than concluding that regulation itself is bad.

Most of those countries such as Canada made certain markets like health insurance public, where it was deemed for the publics benefit not to be run for profit as there's far too many externalities and moral issues. We made the same choice with police and public attorneys. Sometimes, in very rare cases usually invoking peoples health and safety, it makes sense for it to be public.

What doesn't make sense to me is that massive meddling western governments do to prop up these monopolies. Copyright is a perfect example. Or just look a Boeing in 2024 or many Wall St orgs after 2008, special treatment and artificial barriers to completion is a huge and ever growing problem.

And these debates always just dismissed and downplayed because all context gets thrown out and it turns into vague gov regulations vs markets fights, as we see here in this thread.

The cyberpunk future of megacorps ruling the planet will be the result of gov interference in the vast majority of cases. And only a small amount due to lack of any monopoly antitrust enforcement. But both have the same root cause of forever expanding gov technocracy->megacorps define the rules and buy politicians->no one wins.

I'm actually in favor of some government intervention to fix the mess it created or where that is politically more plausible than a free market solution. Antitrust action to break up large companies would be great as would banning non-competes and addressing the culture of companies requiring absurd numbers of interviews to get a job. I also favor regulations to stop fraud such as making it illegal for airlines to sell more seats on a plane than they have.

In medical care, I'd prefer a Singapore style system where the government covers catastrophic care but you have a savings account for everything else. I think that's more viable than a pure free market because a college student who comes down with cancer or gets shot in this very high crime country probably can't afford to pay out of pocket for medical care. Likewise with somebody who gets laid off because their employer wants to increase its stock price.

In general though, I like that we have had significantly higher economic growth than European countries over the past generation and want it to stay that way. So I prefer libertarian solutions over socialist solutions wherever possible.

The problem with that is if you have some. Non recognized illness. Maybe something that gives constant pain but hard to detect. If you are a student, it would be really bad.

What if you have diabetes and are a student?

I appreciate your ideas and do tend to lean libertarian myself overall, but let me offer another perspective as well.

As someone who has lived in both places (European country with many social programs & the US in several states) — yes, wages and “economic growth” are lower in Europe, but the standard of living is very high.

Most people, in the European country that I lived in, ate healthy high-quality food that was cheap compared to the US. There were many bars and restaurants nearby where friends would regularly meet up, but there were also lots of parks that would be filled with people having picnics.

Registering for healthcare was mandatory, but it was cheap — even with our high salaries, we only had to pay 100€ per month for unlimited everything-is-fully-covered healthcare.

The police were generally trustworthy and hands-off. They had a bit of a reputation for being lazy and not responding for non-emergencies, but the streets were incredibly safe - me and my (female) partner were both totally comfortable walking alone at night throughout the city or countryside, and nobody we knew had major problems either (other than teenagers being weird).

Sure, it looks economically worse to ride your bike or take the train to work and walk to the grocery store, since those things don’t cost nearly as much as driving. And having a picnic in the park with a friend and a baguette doesn’t add to GDP like spending $40 on DoorDash to eat McNuggets in your basement.

But the human element is that life is actually much more satisfying and rewarding to get exercise and be a part of your community.

My point is, without having lived experience, it’s not very informative to just compare economic growth alone.

You say that as if corporations don't have a greater ability to screw up the free market so completely.

Why doesn't Disney have meaningful competition? Because they bought them. (Also applies to health care. PE firms buying up everything has hurt us a lot.)

Why don't other just-shy-of-monopoly streaming companies lower their prices to take Disney's customers? Monopolies over streaming rights for shows and back-room deals.

Why don't customers take them to court? Binding arbitration clauses in the click-wrap contracts. (This also applies to your housing problem, by the way - the free market can not work when there is collusion. And that's not my assertion, that's economists' take on the effects of collusion.)

I'm pretty sure this isn't the government who has fucked this up for us customers, it's the corporations. In fact, I'd go so far to say that the weakening of anti-trust enforcement in the Regan era and the polarization of the FTC and other administrative agencies is what allowed this kind of collusion, copyright abuse, and monopoly formation.

EDIT: I'd also ask one further question: Why is the government taking any action in big company's favor? I posit that it's due to the the companies taking semi-legal actions with the legislators who can make laws. Why are the actions legal? Because of prior illegal actions - more back-room deals - no doubt.

For IP there is a market failure if you don't have government regulation. IP is non-rival and non-excludable, and non-rival non-excludible goods don't really work well with free markets.

There are three general ways to address that. (1) Ignore it, which tends to lead to underproduction. (2) Have the government pay for production of IP, which becomes public domain. The downside of this approach is the government has to decide which IP to pay for. (3) Give IP the necessary properties by law for it to work well with a free market. This can fix the underproduction problem but does result in underconsumption.

It might be possible to address the issue in (2) of the government deciding what gets funded. One common suggesting is to fund production through a tax on something that tends to correlate with consumption such as internet access. The money from the tax would fund creation, with the money a work earns going up the more it is downloaded. There'd have to be something to deal with cheating though.

I think there's a case for short term copyrights (28 year terms or less) but I don't think patents are necessary for innovation. You generally can't stop people from copying your food products but we still have a ton of new foods on a regular basis because inventing new food is lucrative even without a government monopoly. The extreme competition and the ability of grocery stores to come out with a store brand copycat keeps big food honest and prices low. Recently, many people have started buying store brands instead of name brands which is why there are tons of signs at the grocery store about price reductions these days.

I do think it'd be hard to make sufficient money to fund a video game or a movie without copyright because they are inherently non-scarce goods once created that can be copied at effectively zero cost. I don't think it matters for books, most of which don't make money for their authors anyway. I also don't think it matters for music because the money there is from live performances and people only care about Taylor Swift's songs because she's singing them.

If we got rid of copyright, government could subsidize the production of works that would be copyrighted by creating a UBI and/or returning to the old norm of a single income household. Many people already create these kinds of works for free and/or ask for donations.

The FOSS community, which only uses copyright law (in the case of GPL) to force FOSS code to stay FOSS or (in the case of MIT) to require attribution, illustrates what the software industry would look like without copyright. Some people, including myself at one point, even work for companies writing FOSS code. Most software companies already make money by selling support contracts, cloud services or ads rather than from selling licenses to copyrighted software so fully abolishing copyright would have surprisingly little impact on tech.

I must be the only one that is not bothered by Disney having a permanent monopoly over Disney characters. They created the characters, they nurtured them, and they maintain their image to this day and this is their business. I am not at all compelled by someone who feels it’s now right, because Mickey is part of American culture, to make their own commercial products with that IP.

Design your own damn characters.

To checksum, do you also believe that The Little Mermaid should still belong to Hans Christian Anderson?

No, and Mickey does not belong to Walt Disney either.

If Hans had created a business that sustained to this day, then that would be different situation.

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Mermaid-Christian-collection-i...

So you don't mean a "permanent monopoly" without any considerations or constraints, then? More of a "use it or lose it" situation?

> having a government enforced monopoly on their content

Sure, but they're just the only company selling Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. Someone else is selling DC, Illumination, and Star Trek content. They're all competing in the entertainment space, so it's not a real problem for pricing. If Disney opened a $2500 per night Star Wars hotel, I'm pretty sure you'd see market forces react.

I'm not sure that there's any way that the market could react. It's Star Wars that's a major part of American culture, not whatever alternative a competitor comes up with. It would be like if a single corporation owned King Arthur or Journey to the West.

At some point you get "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin."

No they wouldn't, because no one else can open one without parasitic drag from Disney.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Starcruise...

> The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+. If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.

Why? What an individual provider wants to optimize is

(number of customers) * ((average) profit per customer)

Depending on the market circumstances either lowering the price to attract more customers or increasing the price to increase "(average) profit per customer" can be the business strategy to choose. The economic concept that you are looking for to decide of these two options is the right one is called "price elasticity of demand":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

Marketshare at any cost sounds like startup bullshit to me.

In manufacturing we called it “dumping”

> competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+

That assumes you can substitute goods.

And trust me, you can't substitute Paradise PD for Gravity Falls.

This is why market segmentation exists.

Meant to?

By whom?

Who makes sure the system operates that way?

A free market just works this way, and various regulations exist to keep it a free market by stopping things like collusion, corruption, fraud and monopolies. However, in order to protect creators rights, other regulations we call copyright grant monopolies. So the 'free market' is not really a free market. An actual free market per your economics text book is a rare thing.

That's the pitch that's generally given by advocates of the free market to justify their position. They tend to do so because "the free market" isn't something that is near universally viewed as an inherent good, so it's necessary to convince people that it's existence results in other goods.

> The free market ... feels like something has gone terribly wrong.

Well yes. It has done for several decades at this point. It's a classic case of Goodhart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In this case the measure is the market price of a good/service and/or the profitability of a business. It is assumed by free-market capitalism to be a good measure of societal value, and it was, more or less. But over time that's become less and less true as people over optimise for the metric.

> The free market is meant to ensure that competitors lower their prices to compete with Disney+.

> it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.

I don't meant to be rude, but I am going to be: have you had your head in the sand for the last.. decade and a half? Something has gone terribly wrong and it's late stage capitalism.

>If instead corporations raise prices to compete with... profits over marketshare, then it feels like something has gone terribly wrong.

wait till you hear about luxury brands

In Monopoly, you win the game when every other player is in a state of permanent poverty/precarity and can never break your power. Don't ever be duped into thinking Monopoly, The Real Life Game, has an end goal that differs in any meaningful sense.

Like Hollywood I expect Disney accounting to be a lot of smoke and mirrors. Disney has a massive back catalog, the oldest movie on the platform is nearly 90 years old.

I am sure Disney is renting Disney+ ancient content at premium market rates and so the platform appears to be unprofitable.

I’m not so sure that’s the case here.

Disney+ massive loses was cited as a major reason for the previous CEO being ousted by the Board, and Iger reinstituted.

The difficulty with screaming is that you can no longer create $100M big budget movies and expect to show a profit from a service costing just $10/mo.

https://insidethemagic.net/2024/04/not-a-profitable-business...

These mega streaming platforms (Disney, Netflix, HBO) all pull ~the yearly total gross of box office ticket sales each independently. Is it the content delivery infrastructure that eats all the revenue to the point of losing money?

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/

I find the difficult part of screaming to be the strain on my vocal chords.

I'm sorry, couldn't help myself. As I get older Dad jokes become funnier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Subsidized service gets unsubsidized. The cost of quarterly profits moves quicker than the cost of rent.

Since the article doesn’t break this out, revenue for that quarter was $2.4b, and pre tax income was 0.6b:

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2024/05/q2-fy24...

So, the streaming service (which is largely back-catalog?) seems to be subsidizing other stuff. I’d hope that most of the $2.4b is going into new content / artists, but I’m guessing it is not.

Lots of things happen between revenue and pre-tax income that aren't "subsidizing other stuff."

When something is on Disney+ it tells me what not to watch, although there are exceptions to this rule.

What happened to the company that made Cool Runnings and other great films?

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