For Disney? No, they own all of the content. But there’s no way Netflix can license all the content it does and get away with charging $7 a month - in fact they just upped my price 2 bucks a month. And while the new content is great and can be your hook for getting people to subscribe, the two most watched shows on Netflix are still Friends and The Office.
A meta thread for video streaming services - Netflix, Hulu, Disney, HBO, Warner, Prime, AppleTV, etc
I do think there’s an approximately 0% chance Disney+ will still cost less than $10/mo after 2 years on the market, but I wouldn’t frame that as driving out competitors. It’ll be about getting people reliant on the service before upping the cost.
My point is, of course Netflix can’t license all the content it does and charge $7. They don’t. But Disney isn’t going to charge $7 if they ever get their library up to parity with Netflix, either. And right now they certainly haven’t.
I like Netflix so I don’t see myself dropping Netflix anytime soon. For me it’s really about how many services I want to carry. Netflix stays, so it’s about keeping or not keeping Prime and adding or not adding a third service. My kids are grown so Disney isn’t as appealing to me. They need to wow me with original new content.
My guess is I’ll subscribe to a service and binge a series or two I want to watch, and then unsub.
I want to see stuff like the Mandelorian but don’t need constant access to the movies. Already have several Marvel movies and all the SW stuff on BluRay. This will probably be like HBO were its sub once or twice a year to binge the stuff I’m interested in.
There’s an original series about Jeff Goldblum. I’m in!
Seriously, between the original Marvel series, the Star Wars stuff, and behind-the-scenes Imagineering documentaries, I’m ready to pony up my $7 a month right now.
Now let’s keep our fingers crossed for Song of the South!
I joked to my sister today that it’s the only movie that won’t be on the service. I actually saw it in the theater in the 80s during a re release. Don’t remember it well.
Well we still have Fantasia and Dumbo and like several others. Song of the South is pretty bad though. I mean it’s right up there with Gone with the Wind bad but animated. The animated part is probably the biggest issue, a lot of kids would see it and the parents would not handle it properly.
Short version: don’t think of Disney+ as a straight SVOD play like Netflix.
Instead think of it in terms of Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). Disney is charging $6.99 per month not because that’s a profitable number for them, but rather it helps them to create more ARPU. Disney knows you’re taking your kids to the theater for Toy Story 4. They know you’re going to see Star Wars IX on a big screen.
Disney+ is more about taking their already mega-popular IP and rocketing it even higher. For Disney, it will act almost as a force multiplier on their wide-ranging properties. And that’s why it could sit at that $6.99/month price point a little bit longer than perhaps you’d think at first.
Another strong point for Disney is little kids will watch the same frigging movie 20 times, and Disney has a lot of the movies that little kids want. It will be the electronic babysitter channel for parents. Kids are being whiny? Let 'em watch Nemo for the 50th time.
I, um, saw it in the sixties on the big screen, as a kid, in Georgia. Suffice it to say that back then the audience was, shall we say, unaware or at least uninterested in the fact that the movie was ahem problematic in many, many ways.
Is there some way to see the content on Hulu without signing up? Alternatively, could someone who has Hulu tell me if they have the show Summer Camp Island?
It’s listed as requiring the $35 “with Live TV” plan. I don’t know if that means they have archive episodes or not because I am sure as fuck not paying that kind of money for a feature I don’t want in the first place.
Thanks, man! Yeah, me either. $35 to essentially be able to see a show is a non-starter. People pay less to watch GoT, lol
You can use this site to see what is available on all the different streaming sites.
That’s 10% of Hulu ownership; wonder how that split will go between Comcast and Disney.
Should it split roughly 2:1 based on ownership of Hulu between Disney and Comcast, The Mouse will own essentially a 2/3rds stake in Hulu. Have to think that Comcast will start looking for an off-ramp soon.
Yup.
I would have thought that Comcast, as new owner of Sky, would be competing directly with any* internationally expanded Hulu. So doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to stick around.
- OK, not any, but certainly in major European markets.
Sadly the show I’m looking for doesn’t even come up there in a search. :(
Interesting (paywalled, sorry) article on Netflix’s approach to financing TV production. Basically they’re backending their payments to production companies over several years after it goes on the service* and requiring the production firms to get loans from banks (or for smaller productions, other financing) to cover the up front costs — and to keep bearing those costs some time after delivery. Basically they’re providing indirect finance to Netflix to ease its cashflow issues.
- Actually, although it kind of asserts that, it’s not clear to me any of the quotes or numbers cited fully back that up. For instance it gives $19.3bn as the number that will be “drip-fed” to producers over the next five years. But that number is just their total “streaming content obligations”, so would include stuff they’ve licensed from other companies, rather than produced themselves. Now, to be fair, the note to Netflix’s account says the increase in that number is “primarily due to multi-year commitments associated with the continued expansion of our exclusive and original programming”. Which seems like support for the FT claim. But on the other hand it would also seem to cover things like the Better Call Saul and Star Trek Discover deals that Netflix does internationally, because they call those “Originals” too.