6 ms·

> It’s Disney’s content That is partly the problem. You spend hundreds of millions to make blockbuster movies and then release it on Disney+ in a few months fo

• ghaff 4y ago
  >You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round. I suspect that, in addition to ad-supported tiers, we'll see more annual subscriptions or at least subscriptions where annual is sufficiently cheaper on a monthly basis that it's essentially an offer a lot of people can't refuse.
  • smachiz 4y ago
    along with maybe a broader return to serialization and longer seasons again - but this only really is valuable for shows that capture the zeitgeist, otherwise most people will just wait until the season ends and subscribe for a month to binge and move on.
  • lastofthemojito 4y ago
    > I suspect that, in addition to ad-supported tiers, we'll see more annual subscriptions or at least subscriptions where annual is sufficiently cheaper on a monthly basis that it's essentially an offer a lot of people can't refuse. I think they're already experimenting with things like that. I signed up for an annual subscription when Disney+ launched (I knew my wife and kid would love it) and when it came time to renew they offered a "Disney Drop Box" as a reward for signing up for another year. The box was a themed selection of Disney merchandise that they claimed was valued at ~$150, which is probably a stretch, but my kid loved it.
  • ska 4y ago
    Isn't this basically what amazon does via prime membership? Apples and oranges I guess because it isn't "just" streaming, but does anyone pay this monthly?
• madeofpalk 4y ago
  On top of the... 'opportunity cost' of not licensing out content that otherwise would have went to Netflix, ABC, whoever. If previously Disney made Daredevil and 'sold' it to Netflix for $1m (hypothetically), but now you're holding that back to stream yourself, you've got to account for that missing $1m somehow.
  • rcme 4y ago
    No you don't. You don't normally include opportunity cost on your balance sheet.
    • nebolo 4y ago
      Not to be pedantic (ok a little bit), but you don't normally include any costs on your balance sheet, but you might want to include them on your income statement.
    • itake 4y ago
      yes and no. The problem is if last year they earned $1m from it by it being on Netflix. Moving it to their own streaming platform will look like a $1m less revenue.
    • madeofpalk 4y ago
      Depending on how org and financials are structured Disney+ may need to purchase Daredevil from the other part of Disney for $1m, which is recognising that opportunity cost.
    • ChildOfChaos 4y ago
      You don't, however Disney was making this money before as they were directly licensing it to these services, so it's not just opportunity cost, but actual lost revenue when compared to previous years.
    • majormajor 4y ago
      These deals can be complex. Consider if you were going to make a movie, and were shopping it around to studios. If Studio A was like "we'll give you a 10% cut of whatever we then license it for for streaming" and Disney was like "we're gonna stream it on our own platform for free, sorry" that's a negotiation problem for Disney. So selling internally at market rate is a good thing for relationships with external creators and partners.
• scarface74 4y ago
  That’s not entirely true. Disney+ is partially losing money because of “transfer payments”. Disney+ has to “pay” Disney studios the market rate for the right to stream a movie. Of course the money mostly flows up to Disney. But from an accounting standpoint, Disney+ can’t say it’s profitable by getting movies for free from Disney studios and cause Disney studios to lose potential profits they could have made elsewhere. There are also revenue share agreements that are involved with actors. That are still taken into accounts > You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round That’s not strictly true either for kids content. You can keep recycling content to kids for years and kids will rewatch the same thing. Disney has been making money off the same animated content for over half a century. To a first approximation, no one cares about Netflix’s back catalog.
  • nkingsy 4y ago
    Octonauts would like to have a word
    • 867-5309 4y ago
      sound the Octo-Alert!
      • voisin 4y ago
        Ok, totally off topic, but am I the only one that hears “Explore, Rescue, Rrotect” rather than “Protect” in the intro? See here at 0:40ish: https://youtu.be/mR_Ui_3Iz2o https://youtu.be/mR_Ui_3Iz2o
        • sogen 4y ago
          I also hear this, sounds very faint, a little bit clearer with headphones.
        • hawski 4y ago
          If I can go on another tangent I would just like to recommend Octonauts. It is charming, funny and clever show. My 5 year old daughter loves it and she would like to have a Tweak costume. I can't stand many kid shows, but this one even I can love. It is incredible for me how Octonauts are not pretentious, like so many "science!" shows for kids are.
• panick21_ 4y ago
  In theories those movies should make most of their money back in the movies. Otherwise the finances don't work out.
• ensignavenger 4y ago
  Disney+ isn't free though...
  • warent 4y ago
    I think the economics of it is basically like, Disney spends so much on creating content that Disney+ just doesn't bring in enough money to cover cost, because users get a subscription to binge / burn thru several things in a single month and then cancel their subscription.
    • dls2016 4y ago
      > users get a subscription to binge / burn thru several things in a single month and then cancel their subscription Surprisingly similar to the old days of bugging my parents for the Disney channel (of course, didn't have on-demand selection back then).
• surge 4y ago
  A lot of it also, is just not that good. And they keep pulling stuff down or putting stuff up. I don't need artificial scarcity, I want access, just as I want to listen to a song on Spotify when I really want to hear it without being told its no longer available with my subscription. I'm subscribing to the Disney library and most of the time half of it is unavailable.
  • joshspankit 4y ago
    Are they still doing “The Vault” over on Disney+?
• msluyter 4y ago
  "1. You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round." For our household, this is true of all streaming services. We rotate them, or subscribe for short stretches. For example, I got Paramount+ for a couple of months, watched all of the Star Trek content, and then cancelled. Amazon Prime is the exception (because free(-ish) shipping.) I wonder to what extent the big streaming services are aware of this phenomenon and how they hope to mitigate it.
  • nordsieck 4y ago
    > I wonder to what extent the big streaming services are aware of this phenomenon and how they hope to mitigate it. I suspect that not many people do this. It it becomes a problem, they can always bring back the old weekly episode model.
    • XorNot 4y ago
      Since I became a parent, waiting for weekly episodes to completely release and then subscribing has become immensely favorable since it turns out I can easily live without being a part of the internet discussion of whatever.
  • twblalock 4y ago
    The services definitely know about this and to a large extent they build it into their model. Every subscription service has a churn model being accounted for. The services also know that the only thing they can do about this is release enough new content to keep users engaged, or bundle the subscription with other ones.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      Or rotate what parts of the library are available each month.
      • auggierose 4y ago
        Or each day! And we are back to where we started.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  What I don't understand about the movie business is the cost of making them. The most important ingredient to the success of a movie is the plot. We've all seen low budget movies that made lots of money - because of the plot. Casablanca, Psycho, Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Primer, ... Star Trek TOS was a very low budget affair, and produced excellent results, because they hired the best scifi writers. When they threw money at the Star Trek movies, they were all terrible. It's the plot that matters. Nothing else.
  • gorbypark 4y ago
    The issue is making money. There are lots of low budget movies with good plots that don’t make money (or not a lot of it). While at the same time, they can make the 5th sequel to some shitty comic book video and almost guarantee a few hundred million in profits. Of course movies can tank, but generally they are not stupid and the accounts have it figured out.
    • WalterBright 4y ago
      If you're going to spent $100 million on a movie, why settle for a boring plot and pedestrian dialog? I watched the La Brea show for a while. Lots of expensive special effects. But the dialog was just pablum. The characters each talked like they were the same person - using the same words and phrases. They behaved the same, too.
      • dbfx 4y ago
        Because it makes money anyway and getting actually good people would cost more nd take longer.
        • WalterBright 4y ago
          I quit watching it, mainly because of the execrable dialog. When you want all the main characters to be eaten by a gru, something is wrong with the writing. I expect the cost of a good writer is a pittance compared with the cost of the production.
• TrueSlacker0 4y ago
  They don't even list all their old content. For example the old Donald duck cartoons, there seem to only be about 15 or so streaming. The rest are not available. Why?
  • LarryMullins 4y ago
    I don't know about Donald Duck cartoons in particular, but I think a lot of those old cartoons are difficult to find because they contain content that the corporation fears might offend somebody. Racist (or arguably so) ethnic caricatures, extreme cartoon violence, that sort of thing. For instance, the original version of Disney's The Three Little Pigs has the wolf disguising himself as a stereotypical Jewish merchant.
    • golem14 4y ago
      So, pay someone with good sensitivities to watch the cartoons and decide based on notes. How expensive can that be ? Or, integrate a feedback system and take down complained-about cartoons quickly. That's probably better since sensitivities change and some perfectly fine items today might be off-limits tomorrow. Doing nothing is not a great option, even if it's the easiest to implement.
      • LarryMullins 4y ago
        > So, pay someone with good sensitivities to watch the cartoons and decide based on notes. Maybe they did, and that's why the cartoons aren't available? If you have to cut X% of a show for content, maybe they make the call to cut the show entirely and pretend it doesn't exist, just so they don't have to answer awkward questions about why so much of the show is missing.
      • dangus 4y ago
        In sales there’s a concept where you don’t just sell against competitors, you sell against doing nothing. What’s the convincing reason for Disney to not simply do nothing? Sell me on Disney digitizing and releasing old cartoons with the salary of at least one person versus doing absolutely nothing. You also have to sell me on that employee working on the Donald Duck smoking cigars and speaking in a Mid-Atlantic accent archive project versus working on something else. Why is that employee not instead working on The Avengers Versus Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Hulk We Groot Again!”
• baxtr 4y ago
  Actually I’m personally ok with 1-2 really good series (e.g. Andor) a year. I think the yearly price tag is reasonable for that. I have to admit though that the rest of the year is used up by the kids watching cartoons on D+
• jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  > You can’t have enough new content every month, subscribers therefore don’t keep the subscription year round. Didn't Disney's CEO talk about getting to the point of having a movie release a day or something like that late last year? The quality might be questionable at that rate.