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Bob Iger Takes the Gloves Off for Disney’s Streaming Debut
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- nabla9 7y ago> MoffettNathanson LLC, a media and technology investment firm, expects its three services to lose a combined $11 billion over the next four years, then finally turn a profit in 2024. And that’s if all goes according to plan. Companies will bleed insane amount of money in the streaming war.
- falcor84 7y agoI suppose it's a great time to be a creative professional in TV/film (not sure whether that distinction even matters anymore).
- jumelles 7y agoAbsolutely. And it's important to keep in mind that were it not for unions (SAG-AFTRA and IATSE mainly) it would likely be a very different story, with low wages and unsafe working conditions.
- stevenwoo 7y agoThere's a story this week in the Los Angeles Times detailing the struggles of assistants in the entertainment industry where a lot of professionals got their start, mirroring the strike in the fictional Hollywoo of Bojack Horseman's latest half season, somehow the streaming wars are pointed at for causing worse working conditions/prolonging time as assistant. "Shorter seasons, longer hiatuses and the increase in limited series have greatly impacted residuals and opportunities while introducing more financial insecurity." https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2019-11-02/la-et-ct-hollywood-assistants-revolt https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
- arcticfox 7y agoProbably, especially a good one. For the longest time almost anything Netflix made was good -- now they seem to be struggling to get talent. These days they're having to approve steaming garbage like 'Another Life' (6% on Rotten Tomatoes - it's painfully bad) just to keep churning out content.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoThe "Who has deeper pockets?" game doesn't seem to be the intended competition by which capitalism is good. I don't like this timeline.
- Sendotsh 7y agoI’ve heard more excitement about Disney+ from family/friends than any other tech launch I can remember. Short of maybe the original iPhone, and maybe the Nintendo Switch. Techies and non-techies alike are counting down the days until it launches. I’m generally someone who speaks with my wallet, I pay for FastMail and use DDG rather than use Google, I go out of my way and spend more to not support shitty companies, and I personally think Disney is among the most evil companies out there (for their Copyright lobbying etc).. but I’m finding it very bloody hard to resist the idea of unlimited streaming Star Wars, Simpsons, and Disney classics for my kids. Barring some major tech fuckups from Disney, I’m pretty sure this will be absolutely huge.
- colechristensen 7y agoI'm not even remotely interested and haven't heard a word about it from anyone I know. I don't like throwing around words like evil much any more but I don't like Disney and can't see why I would want the service even if I did.
- dwoozle 7y agoI’ve never bought a bra but somehow they manage to sell a lot of them.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> are counting down the days until it launches I don't understand - Disney already has a streaming service - DisneyLife. Why's everyone talking about Disney+ like you can't already stream Disney's classic movies, and Marvel, and Star Wars content, all in one place?
- khazhou 7y agoAll CEO bios like to begin by noting how early they wake up, and how the work out every morning at 6am at the very latest. I used to think this was a form of self-aggrandizement. "I'm a powerful CEO because I have superhuman discipline and stamina that you can't even imagine!" Now I just wonder: am I lazy?
- chatmasta 7y ago1. It’s a lot easier to maintain a schedule like that when you have a team of people to hold you accountable 2. They’re probably describing their ideal day, that actually happens less than 30% of the time
- arxpoetica 7y agoNot so. I know people who live this way.
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- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoIn my experience, this isn't it at all. The more people who need your input/help and make demands on your time, the less personal and free time you have. Being a CEO feels exactly like being a Dad with 6 Toddlers. If you want even a micro-second for yourself it has to be before everyone else wakes up. That's why they wake up at 4:00am. It's not because they are dominating the world... its because they are trying to hide from it.
- chatmasta 7y agoI wonder how many CEO's are the opposite, i.e. stay up late for the same reasons.
- gordon_freeman 7y agoElon Musk?
- disneypirate 7y agoDisney is an awful company, and I strongly disagree with their attempt to monopolize streaming. I know lots of people will gladly fork over their money, but this move is just making sure I'll be pirating all the the exclusive content I can't find elsewhere
- coldcode 7y agoI find it amusing that some people are fine with stealing, until it happens to them.
- brenden2 7y agoI've mostly gone back to using torrents. Too many different services, most of the new content sucks, and the software isn't always good. VLC always works, and I can rewatch old shows I've downloaded as many times as I want without having to worry about the platform revoking access.
- hos234 7y agoIt does seem a bit oversaturated. You could probably sell a Terabyte hard disk with the best shows and movies ever made and probably keep people entertained for quite a while.
- henryfjordan 7y agoApparently this is a thing in Cuba: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655
- arbitrary_name 7y agoVery popular in south america. In Peru you could go to the local mercado and some dude would give you a binder full of music, movies and shows - you would pick all the stuff you wanted and return in a few hours and buy a fully loaded thumb/hard drive from him. I have an incredible archive of traditional 'charango' music from Bolivia and Peru through these fine gents, but they had all the latest HBO and Hollywood stuff as well.
- jumelles 7y agoWhat format does the music come in?
- edgarvaldes 7y agoAnd you can also have Plex and similar to manage your library, if you need it.
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- jimbob45 7y agoI remember being unbelievably hyped for Hulu when it launched in 2007. I got into the beta and watched shows for 6 hours straight (wooo Burn Notice). As a consumer, I was voluntarily watching commercials in exchange for being able to see the shows I missed during the week on the internet. It seemed like a fair 1:1 trade for me because I was just watching the commercials that I would have seen on TV anyway. The 1:1 trade doesn't seem so balanced anymore.
- urda 7y agoStreaming is becoming too fragmented, too many studios are "taking their ball home" by pulling popular shows from Netflix / others just to support their specific platform. Meanwhile, my NAS and Plex server don't seem to mind serving up DRM free files of mine.
- edgarvaldes 7y agoHow difficult it is to set up a NAS? Any decent and up to date guide out there?
- perfect_wave 7y agoI too would love to look into this. I spent a bit of time researching Kaliedoscope and Plex, It seems like a lot of work to initially setup, but once done having the ability to download torrents automatically or with a text sounds amazing. The harder part would be convincing my girlfriend and roommate to ditch cable... We have the option to get gigabit internet but I was outvoted on the switch. Gotta fork over money to Comcast because they don't mind the ads.
- murraybhenson 7y agoA NAS, something like a Synology DS218+, is fairly easy to setup. I'm not a sysadmin or anything like that, though I do have some experience with Linux (2000-2005). My main OS these days is MacOS. I wouldn't want to have my 70 year old father try to set it up, but if you're on Hacker News you probably will cope with it ok. It's my opinion that it's more time-consuming and tricky to rip/re-encode everything. I use MakeMKV and a few extra apps to rip/convert subtitles. Handbrake is, seemingly, what everyone uses to convert to MP4/MKV or whatever... and it takes a fair bit of patience to find the sweet spot of quality, size, and compatibility. I started ripping/converting DVDs and BluRays last year around this time and I'm still on it. Some of that is due to the fact that I've had to go back and re-rip stuff and some of that is due to the fact that the machine I'm using for conversion is about 10 years old. A BR film takes about a day to a day and a half to encode.
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- Yoofie 7y agoInteresting. I also read an interesting article[1] by Matt Stoller where he makes a good argument for breaking up companies like Disney for their anti-competitive behavior. [1]: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-disney-part https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-disn...
- pengstrom 7y agoI've always been apprehensive towards corporate acquisitions. I mean, why try to compete when you can just buy them?
- kortilla 7y agoWell then another competitor will pop up. You have to still compete in some form if you don’t have a monopoly or some form of regulatory capture. If McDonald’s started acquiring lemonade stands the moment they opened up, you’d start to see a lot of lemonade stands.
- sbarre 7y agoSure but that's not really good for the consumer, that's just good for lemonade stand owners, who aren't really opening their stands to provide a competitive service, they're just looking to cash out when McDonalds buys them..
- kortilla 7y agoOf course it’s good. Consumers get lower prices from the opening stands. Eventually McDonald’s will need to start selling lemonade or won’t be able to afford buying all of the stands.
- soared 7y agoLarry Ellison would agree, and built a fortune based on that opinion.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/cp7s3 http://archive.is/cp7s3
- shmerl 7y agoToo many stores with too many exclusives offered for rent only. Too bad for them, it will only increase piracy, since those stores don't sell individual titles, but all require paying a constant renting fee. No one is interested in paying too many of such fees at once. The idea of many similar stores that push exclusives could scale for purchasing, but not for rent.
- polymath21 7y agoI find it a bit funny how many people in here think Disney sucks now. The tech/developer crowd clearly is not their audience (which is fine). I personally think Disney has done a good job with the Marvel acquisition by taking some pretty unknown characters and turning them into heroes on par with Spiderman which 10-15 years ago would be unbelievable. The Last Jedi on the other hand I thought was meh. Leia floating through space? That's pushing it. Anecdotally, I was just at Disneyland on a weekday recently and it was as packed as can be, and among my friends who aren't at in tech many of them are diehard Disney fans and are super excited for Disney+ (especially their new show Mandalorian). Considering Disney's track record at the box office the last 5 years I expect Disney+ to do well.
- lawn 7y agoDisney did one thing well with Marvel: they kept out of it and let Marvelstudios do their thing. Well they almost fucked up Guardians of the Galaxy 3 with the firing of Gunn.
- riffraff 7y agoI am not sure this is true. The latest Spiderman is basically Hanna Montana with superpowers. Compare with the previous two versions or even Spiderman: into the spiderverse.
- ian0 7y ago>> “I’ve probably seen each episode of The Mandalorian three times,” Iger says. “First, to give some notes. Second, to see the rough cut and the impact of the notes. And now, just recently, I watched all the final cuts so that I could be blown away by how it looks.” You see this sometimes in large B2B projects. As soon as v senior management are involved in "tweaking" products you know you are likely screwed given their disconnect and lack of ability for people further down to say "no". And thats for software, cant imagine the impact it would have on something as creative as movies/TV.
- inovica 7y agoI think it depends on the culture. If you look at what Iger has done with Disney then it could be that he can genuinely add something in a similar way that I believe Steve Jobs added to Apple products. In some corporate culture then yes, it could be detrimental, but from what I have read about Iger and what he has achieved I'd say that it would be positive him being involved
- samsari 7y agoIndeed. For all we know he only watched it to "give some notes" because he was actually invited to do so by the producers.
- whywhywhywhy 7y agoI'd consider Apple an example of exactly why this sort of input is bad for entertainment, Tim Cook personally cancelled their first scripted show after supposedly wasting two years making it [1]. With companies like Apple and Disney at the helm you're only going to get milquetoast film and TV. Not saying TV needs sex and violence to be good, but once creators are limited through the lens of a wider production company brand, they're always going to be limited. Typical case of the person writing the cheque thinking they're way more important to the creation of the work than they actually are, Disney and Apple execs live in a world where they have convinced themselves we'd watch their movies and at the end think "Wow, Disney/Apple did a great job on this" rather than the director or actors. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-sex-please-were-apple-iphone-giant-seeks-tv-success-on-its-own-terms-1537588880 https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-sex-please-were-apple-iphone...
- sbr464 7y agoThis reminds me of the Blockbuster video/Netflix gloves off battle, similar commentary. Hopefully Disney has more sucess than the current TGI Friday’s CEO who was on the wrong side of the fight. It’s good reading if you aren’t familiar.
- tgv 7y agoI'm still waiting for the content. I had the free subscription, and it was dismal, certainly for someone who doesn't like Marvel. Producing a few chapters of a Star Wars spinoff or another "Beyond Infinity Avengers War Universe" isn't going to bind many people. Their streaming isn't great either. The two times we watched a movie, playback was regularly interrupted, one of which proved impossible to continue that same evening. And no, that never happens when watching Netflix.