12 ms·

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants

I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. Sure I whack an episode of Rick and Morty on via Netflix once a month, but 90% of viewing is of new serialized content. Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. But the IP dilution and very real costs of beaming 4K video around the world on demand don’t mix well together. Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch - the models are vastly different, and perhaps in this case, lethal.

graphe 3y ago
> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
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- kranke155 3y ago
  Marvel and Star Wars are managed in radically different ways, by completely different "PM"s.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Weird, I couldn’t tell at all since they both have converged on the exact same format.
    - kranke155 3y ago
      Are you serious? TLDR: They feel pretty different to me. SW has nowhere to go and is trying to go nowhere. Marvel continues doing its thing, within the level of competence they've always demonstrated. I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters. Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2). BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault). So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance. Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result. Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".
      - jghn 3y ago
        Meanwhile I loved Clone Wars & Rebels, as well as Rogue One. Thus I'm digging shows like Ahsoka & Andor. I'm less excited about the shows tied to the main movies like Boba Fett & Kenobi.
      - 3y ago
- bluepizza 3y ago
  > Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. Corporations don't have feelings. It is okay to be mean to multi billion dollar corporations.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Corporations don't have hands to wring either. I don't love Disney, either IP or their agenda but they didn't wring it. Factually. They bought an IP to add onto it. If any company wringed anything it was Google buying Motorola for patents and then spitting out the bones to resell.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Corporations are made up of people and groups of people do very much have feelings.
    - tedivm 3y ago
      Corporations are people when it benefits them, and are mindless machines when it benefits them. Right now they're people because they're being criticized. When they do massive layoffs they're just a business doing business things. When it comes to advertising they're people with free speech rights, but when they're committing wage theft they're just businesses and no one goes to jail. When they hire lobbyists it's their right as people, but when they violate laws meant to keep our environment safe they're just companies again and are hit with a small fine. It's amazingly convenient (for the corporations at least) that they are only people when it benefits them but can drop that title easily when it makes them more money and shields those people from consequences.
  - ta_1138 3y ago
    You can be mean to people too! However, if you want to model the corporations correctly, you'll not go very far by thinking they are soulless machines. Most of the reasons corporations fail is people making awful decisions than help themselves personally, and harm long term corporate value. As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable. That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.
- JoBrad 3y ago
  For my family, Disney’s value is more balanced between old and new content, vs Netflix, which I expect to lose content after some time.
- axpy906 3y ago
  This comment reminded me of South Park’s Panderverse for some reason.
- beardedwizard 3y ago
  Making all those awful Marvel and Star Wars movies and taking our money anyway was pretty mean too.
- erellsworth 3y ago
  > Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
  - graphe 3y ago
    Religions don't wring up other religions by making more media of other religions.
    - erellsworth 3y ago
      WTF does religion have to do with this? I have no idea what you're trying to say.
      - graphe 3y ago
        You don't wring anything by making more media. It is a ridiculous idea to think.
        erellsworth 3y ago
        You absolutely can wring something out by making too much of it. There's a reason "superhero fatigue" is a thing.
  - pnutjam 3y ago
    Bingo, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like I can't start in the middle and it's impossible to track back to the first story or there are just way too many so I just give up and don't watch any. They did that with Pirates of the Caribbean first... I blinked and there were 5 of them.
  - geodel 3y ago
    > you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track. Still in luck, you are not yet in Hadoop domain :-)
- babyshake 3y ago
  > Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.
- cpuguy83 3y ago
  Andor is phenomenal at least.
sethd 3y ago
> and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix. Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor. I can remember when Blockbuster and video rental stores would put all this in a foreign language section, which was then further broken down by genre.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Netflix’s foreign content is quite good. Especially the Korean stuff is pretty high quality and way cheaper to produce, seems like a good idea to me.
  - sethd 3y ago
    I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.
    - surgical_fire 3y ago
      What is foreign language for such a global service? If I am in Spain, should shows in English be bundled in a "Foreign Language" along with Korean dramas, Japanese animation, and a couple of odd series in Dutch? How is this helpful? Not saying that language categorization is a bad thing. Being able to filter shows that are available in a specific audio language, or with a specific language available for subtitles, would be a bad thing. But I seriously question the helpfulness of "English" and "Other"
      - sethd 3y ago
        I think the right approach would be to label content that is not in the source language you have set as your device locale. It’s not about filtering out the content, it’s about making it easy to tell whether or not it’s going to start playing with dubbed audio so the viewer can make a better choice.
ken47 3y ago
Do you have any first hand sources of Disney’s thought process and strategy as you’ve summarized them here? Calling Disney naive is bold.
aCoreyJ 3y ago
Disney really shouldn't even be included in the first sentence of this article, according to itself they have 8 million subscribers and are expecting to be profitable next year.
- mhaberl 3y ago
  With a subscriber base of 8 million, assuming hypothetically that each pays $15 monthly over an entire year (a figure which is inflated), the resultant annual _revenue_ would be approximately $1.4 billion. However, their financial losses this year have exceeded even this ($1.6 billion in first 9 months alone) Their projection of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year seems, under these circumstances, quite optimistic :)
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    Disney also has Hulu and ESPN+. (They rolled up Hulu after acquiring a majority share with the purchase of Fox)
    - aqfamnzc 3y ago
      Oh, interesting. I'm surprised they haven't merged them / moved people over / shut down Hulu.
      - geodel 3y ago
        They have stake in Hulu, other partner is Comcast. So Disney can't just shut it down on their own.
        maxerickson 3y ago
        They are in the process of selling it to Disney (following a 2019 deal giving them the option). https://deadline.com/2023/12/comcast-disney-hulu-mike-cavanagh-1235650499/ https://deadline.com/2023/12/comcast-disney-hulu-mike-cavana... To some extent, Disney are using it as their adult oriented streaming service in the US.
ksec 3y ago
>I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding I love this. I am not being sarcastic but the optimistic and somewhat enthusiasm of fundamental misunderstanding. >It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy I am old. But it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance. But then I also remember for more than 10 years the media went with the idea that "execution eats strategy for breakfast."
- scruple 3y ago
  > it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance. How much money did the executive make while it took years for these strategies to fail? How much will they make from the golden parachute if they're actually fired for their failures? Is that really failure, relative to the executive?
fzeroracer 3y ago
Ultimately yeah, it's this. Netflix wins because it understands hanging your hat on one series or IP is business suicide. They churn out a bunch of shows, from higher budget big IPs to a bunch of lower budget series and animations. David Zaslav and other media execs wanted to try and force the old media philosophy in the streaming environment, which also meant executing a bunch of mid-budget and lower-budget series to try and save money. Except they also shot their only chance of following the actually successful model of Netflix.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  Yes because running NFLX, by comparison, is probably not as "fun" of a job as running a traditional media org. Imagine being in charge of IP you watched as a kid, mingling with famous actors & directors .. it's very sexy. It's a ticket to a different social life. A lot of them are larger than life personalities than come from media families. Netflix by comparison is like running any other FAANG. Pays well, but you can live a pretty rich-but-anonymous life still. I had to look up who was running NFLX these days, and one of the co-CEOs doesn't even have a picture on his Wiki page.
- geodel 3y ago
  Well Amazon shot many very expensive shows and they turned out to be crapola. The only thing favored Amazon studios was huge cash from Amazon so they could just be fine with all mega failures. So far lot of streaming shows are crappy in a way I can't quite put my finger on and its definitely not just about budget.
  - skydhash 3y ago
    I believe it’s the writing. There is no soul in te dialogue and characterization always seems forced. Acting and set design may be good, but it feels like no one is giving a damn about the scenario
    - kyriakos 3y ago
      I feel the opposite for Netflix, which has better writing but worse acting, casting, costumes and generally plastic feeling on most of its original shows.
geraldwhen 3y ago
Disney could have done that and I would have paid. But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy. Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.
- jl6 3y ago
  All the old Disney back catalog is still new to my kids so they just watch that and ignore the new junk.
  - dpflan 3y ago
    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?
  - lolinder 3y ago
    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?
    - geraldwhen 3y ago
      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.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Maybe Disney just needs to start charging Netflix prices?
dom96 3y ago
> The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. I'd love to see this backed up by sources. I for one recall seeing streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed. Anecdotally, I watch and rewatch a lot of old series. Like I'm rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix right now.
- dpflan 3y ago
  It's definitely relative to some degree, X-Files is new content to people of a certain age.
- scruple 3y ago
  The perspective isn't "this is old" it's "think of all of the people born after $THING released, it's new to them."
- lolinder 3y ago
  > streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed. This doesn't contradict OP—Disney's new content is mostly bad, so it's unsurprising that on their platform people are watching older stuff. But would that have been true of Netflix before everything fragmented? And how many people aren't on Disney+ at all because they'd prefer to see new, good content and already finished what little Disney is putting out?
- strunz 3y ago
  Isn't Suits - a long since lapsed cable series - like the most popular thing on Netflix? So was Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office for a time too. People love to think they can generalize all streamers into a bucket when in reality it's not as simple as anyone thinks. Viewing trends change all the time and can be unpredictable, even horrible stuff gets tons of views.
  - nvm0n2 3y ago
    Apparently not: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv Top 10 is pretty dynamic. Longest item there was there for 6 weeks and is new content. Hilariously "Fireplace 4K: Crackling Birchwood from Fireplace for Your Home" beats out Squid Game.
ren_engineer 3y ago
Everybody wanted to control the entire pie, when in reality almost all of them would have been better off just licensing their content to Netflix and not worrying about streaming distribution
- lolinder 3y ago
  So much this. Netflix was valuable to me because I could watch any movie at any time, but now the streaming space is so fragmented that no single provider is worth the price of the subscription, so our family doesn't pay for any of them. We told ourselves that if we really want to watch movies we'd just rent them off Amazon on a case-by-case basis, but in practice we just completely stopped consuming streaming content as a family. If there are other families like us, then their greed made the whole pie much smaller.
  - dimitrios1 3y ago
    I am in this boat as well. Our stream subscriptions are down to zero -- just the one I get for free with my cell carrier. And as for Disney and whatever the heck it is they have become, I have reverted back to purchasing purchased discs of any good movies or series.
    - Bendy 3y ago
      Same, and with my toddler we’re back to good old fashioned DVDs. They may be slower, fragile and have a few unskippable parts but at least the ads are predictable, they don’t involve endless scrolling, and they belong to you.
      - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
        I kind of skipped the whole blue-ray thing, but is there a reason for DVD over blue-ray besides the price?
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I keep Netflix subscription most out of loyalty than anything else. I've had Amazon prime since it was first introduced but may drop it after the recent announcement. I also tend to rent from Amazon if it's not on netflix, but if it's on neither or I disagree with the rent price or they don't allow you to rent, I just pirate. I'm ok with them having my money, but once they started pulling everything off of netflix the entire landscape because anti-consumer. Their greed lost them my money.
apwell23 3y ago
> I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. > Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. If it was so fundamental and obvious like you state wouldn't you have been super rich by now by buying netflix stock when it crashed in 2022. Maybe you are ? Dominant narrative back then was that netflix is nothing specail. Building a stream app is a commodity that anyone can build and the old-world providers have content that people want to watch.
- abracadaniel 3y ago
  Everything was doom and gloom for Netflix as I remember it. They were wholly dependent on the licensed content that they will inevitably lose. I guess it turns out that becoming a studio is easier than becoming a streaming platform.
  - skeeter2020 3y ago
    Netflix - The Studio is extremely sub-par, even by today's lacklustre standards. Sure, they have the occasional success; you throw enough garbage against the wall and something will stick.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    Either that or Netflix just did a better job than the studios did. Just because someone was more successful with one strategy than someone else was with a different strategy doesn't mean that the strategy is superior, they could just be a better overall player or even a worse player that happened to outmaneuver a better player, or, even, in the massive multiplayer battle royale that is our economy, a worse player that made bad decisions but happened to luck into ideal market conditions. I don't think Zoom did anything particularly revolutionary, their product just happened to be the exact right balance at the exact right time.
- procrastitron 3y ago
  Any argument of the form “if you knew that all along you’d be rich by now from playing the stock market” is fundamentally flawed because it overlooks one of the most well known dangers of the stock market: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” It absolutely was obvious ahead of time that most of the competing streaming services would fail because they couldn’t possibly recreate the infrastructure of Netflix, but it was not possible to predict when they would fail. For a concrete example, before Paramount+ launched I predicted that it would be dead in less than a year. Clearly I was wrong because it’s still going 2 years later. I still think it will die relatively soon, but predicting exactly when is virtually impossible.
Tao3300 3y ago
> classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch The Mall of Damocles
jonplackett 3y ago
It’s funny how crap the other streamers apps still are compared to Netflix. Little things matter. Netflix always picks up the exact second you left a show. Apple, Disney and prime sometimes jump back 5 minutes or even more. Netflix app opens super fast even in my crap old smart TV. Apple, Disney, prime take ages. Even when open the UI is very sloppy. Netflix adjusts the streaming quality depending on your connection. Which means things download fast / stream reliably and also presumable saves them a tonne of bandwidth. An then they actually have good content too…
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  Prime never remembers when I finish an episode correctly. It’s always a few minutes from the end or even forgotten I watched it at all. It’s a mess to pick up a new season and struggle with, did I actually watch the complete last season?
- thefounder 3y ago
  Netflix streaming looks worst on my 150" screen. Some shows are watchables but some are simply junk bitrate wise to the point I get huge posterisation effects/pixels. The quality of the content itself is another issue. For movies I just get the disk and store it forever with r.volution NAS(aka old zappiti NAS)
  - cpuguy83 3y ago
    4K at 150" would look like crap. Do any streaming services support 8K? That is a lot of bandwidth and decode overhead.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      >4K at 150" would look like crap I mean it would really depend how close you're sitting to the screen, wouldn't it?
      - cpuguy83 3y ago
lolinder 3y ago
Netflix's secret starting in their DVD days was to provide a service that had way more variety than Blockbuster, so that no matter who you were, the movies you wanted to watch would be available. Disney especially was arrogant enough to assume that they controlled all the IP that people actually want to watch, so they thought they could just pull out of Netflix and everyone would switch. But that's not how movie preferences work. There's no brand loyalty, there are movies (and shows) people like and movies they don't, and each person's set of preferred movies is unique and spread out across studios. Disney isn't Apple.
- geodel 3y ago
  To be honest I give credit to consumers to puncture Disney's inflated ego and bring them down to earth. If a minimum threshold of folks kept hankering for Disney's content to keep them in good financial condition they'd remain arrogant as ever.
- dham 3y ago
  You also have to be willing to be put out good content that isn't written by ChatGPT, which, as we've seen, Disney has been unable to do for quite some time.
clwg 3y ago
On the flip side, the old content is exactly what I want. I'm a big fan of Star Trek, including TNG, Voyager, DS9, and even Enterprise. If I play music while I work, I find myself getting distracted by it. So, I prefer to have Star Trek playing in the background since I've seen every episode multiple many times it's really just comforting background competence porn. Other than that, I don't really watch much TV but it's nice to have if I'm bored. In the last year, I've had to switch streaming providers four times to access this catalogue. I've moved from Netflix to Paramount to Crave (I'm in Canada) and now I'm back on Netflix. For Christmas, I bought myself a Mini PC and a subscription to Proton VPN. At this point, I've spent enough money on Star Trek and a small amount of movies that I don't feel the moral issues I would if I were pirating indie games or something similar.
- kshacker 3y ago
  Voyager was one series I never completed before the streaming roulette started. Not sure how I started looking for it but I finally said no thanks to subs and bought a box set for 50 bucks. I can watch at my own pace and don't have to shell out 10-25 bucks every month. Have seen DS9 but may do the same there since the price (50 bucks) is so compelling as compared to streaming monthly costs, and you get to keep it forever (forever defined by some arbitrary parameter and not equal to infinity)
- graphe 3y ago
  Why stream when you can either buy/torrent old media? I don't see a point to streaming when its more efficient to buy or download.
  - iteria 3y ago
    Because buy doesn't exist in a sane form for some things. Kids shows are known for never selling by season and only by some weird theme and of course there are dupes between sets. Buy isn't an option at all for some stuff. I'm looking at you Disney vault bulkshit, but also other not as iconic stuff. Yes pirate, but that's a problem too. I've tried to pirate some stuff that wasn't popular or it was too old and you're just not able to. Streaming removes a lot of that hassle. Now that the price is becoming too high, people are considering other options, but there is a reason it exists. Streaming is how I let my kids explore media. Yes, I can just give them my childhood favs, but they need a way to try new shows without me directly interfering and it's been great. I would have never picked out my kid's favs for her.
l1tany11 3y ago
I don’t think “beaming 4k video around the world” is really an issue at all. The way the internet works, with peering etc. bandwidth is super, super cheap. It’s basically too cheap to meter. AWS bandwidth pricing has no relationship to actual bandwidth costs and never did. Netflix has for years been operating open connect, basically they place proxy servers with ISPs (effectively a peering type arrangement). In 2021 Netflix said they spent $1B worldwide on open connect over the previous 10 years. But they spent $19B last year on “cost of revenue” which basically means content. $20B a year on content. $0.1B a year on their CDN. I can’t imagine Disney, Comcast, etc is much different.
LanzVonL 3y ago
Disney has admitted they aren't trying to please Star Wars fans. Amazon has admitted they aren't trying to please Tolkien fans. Fans already consider these new developments of timeless classics to be non-canon no matter who technically owns the rights. It'll be a lesson taught in brand management for eons, until the heat death of the sun - don't acquire a property which is only valuable because of fans, just to discard the very thing that gives it value - the fans. They truly will learn their lessons, or somebody else will.
- dham 3y ago
  This. I've always wondered why these companies are trying to create content for audiences that literally don't exist. It's really only shown up in the last few. years.
  - LanzVonL 3y ago
    They're government supported, is my guess. There's no profit motive so everybody can do whatever they want.
tetromino_ 3y ago
> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. I stopped subscribing to Netflix around 2 years ago because that "sophisticated production tooling" was producing almost purely garbage tier content. With the exception of Black Mirror, there were no compelling new shows - and Black Mirror on its own was not worth the monthly subscription.
harimau777 3y ago
I think that part of the problem might be that streaming no longer reliably supplies the old classics. I would likely pay for a service where when someone says "You haven't seen X? It's a classic!" I could reliably watch it. However, in practice the classics are spread across so many different services that none of them are worth subscribing to.

graphe 3y ago

> Disney naively thought they could just serve up old classics while wringing the life out of Marvel and Star Wars IP and people would happily continue to pay. Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Their movies and shows sound like propaganda with Twitter quips and they aren't good. Marvel and star wars peaked under Disney the same way that Apple peaked from Tim Cook in terms of profit, only apple products are still good.

AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
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kranke155 3y ago
Marvel and Star Wars are managed in radically different ways, by completely different "PM"s.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Weird, I couldn’t tell at all since they both have converged on the exact same format.
  - kranke155 3y ago
    Are you serious? TLDR: They feel pretty different to me. SW has nowhere to go and is trying to go nowhere. Marvel continues doing its thing, within the level of competence they've always demonstrated. I find that SW has declined to a level previously unimaginable, they are effectively stuck doing live action versions of children's animated TV shows. The mild incompetence of Clone Wars is now a distant memory, the lowest level of quality in a SW fiction project ever has been breached multiple times now by shows such as Boba Fett. The whole universe has no guiding function, expect to retcon as much as possible on top of previously very popular characters. Marvel has ALWAYS been a milquetoast production company, with some big hits like Iron Man, Avengers films, etc. But most of their production has always been "ok", and having watched The Marvels recently, I felt like they're just going back to their Phase 1 days, where some films were good, many not really (Thor 2, Avengers 2, Iron Man 2). BUT Marvel has a guideline for where they want to take their content, even if they just recently lost a major actor (only his own fault). So yeah I do think there's a difference. Marvel is ok, has always been ok, with some moments of brilliance. Star Wars was a bit all over the place but it definitely had new ideas, every single movie introduced something interesting, be it a location/planet, a character or spaceship. It didn't constantly flirt with the same recycled material ad nauseam, because its creative direction was set, even if sometimes the audience did not like the result. Current Star Wars creative direction is nil outside of "let's find some other popular side character to wrap a show around, maybe?". There is no story line that makes any sense for the SW being produced, it's just a grab bag of "this worked I guess".
    - jghn 3y ago
      Meanwhile I loved Clone Wars & Rebels, as well as Rogue One. Thus I'm digging shows like Ahsoka & Andor. I'm less excited about the shows tied to the main movies like Boba Fett & Kenobi.
    - 3y ago
bluepizza 3y ago
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. Corporations don't have feelings. It is okay to be mean to multi billion dollar corporations.
- graphe 3y ago
  Corporations don't have hands to wring either. I don't love Disney, either IP or their agenda but they didn't wring it. Factually. They bought an IP to add onto it. If any company wringed anything it was Google buying Motorola for patents and then spitting out the bones to resell.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Corporations are made up of people and groups of people do very much have feelings.
  - tedivm 3y ago
    Corporations are people when it benefits them, and are mindless machines when it benefits them. Right now they're people because they're being criticized. When they do massive layoffs they're just a business doing business things. When it comes to advertising they're people with free speech rights, but when they're committing wage theft they're just businesses and no one goes to jail. When they hire lobbyists it's their right as people, but when they violate laws meant to keep our environment safe they're just companies again and are hit with a small fine. It's amazingly convenient (for the corporations at least) that they are only people when it benefits them but can drop that title easily when it makes them more money and shields those people from consequences.
- ta_1138 3y ago
  You can be mean to people too! However, if you want to model the corporations correctly, you'll not go very far by thinking they are soulless machines. Most of the reasons corporations fail is people making awful decisions than help themselves personally, and harm long term corporate value. As for low-quality content, I work with people that have made very bad entertainment. Nobody starts out thinking they'll make something bad. There might be some lowering of standards when, say, the voice acting manager and the voice actor decide that it's not coming out right, and there's no budget to try another 3 days.CGI gets planned for some amount, and when time and a half that is spent, Leia still looks like she is made of plastic. Maybe the writing sounded good to a decision maker, but they had terrible taste. Nobody tries to make it bad, but sometimes we get to choose between bad, and probably still mediocre, and massively unprofitable. That was Disney's problem this year. A lot of content was super expensive: Go look at the budget for Dial of Destiny, or the per-episode cost of she-hulk. So high that they'd have to be the most viewed things ever to have a prayer at being worthwhile. People were trying their best, and the output wasn't a total embarrassment... but they were all money losers.
JoBrad 3y ago
For my family, Disney’s value is more balanced between old and new content, vs Netflix, which I expect to lose content after some time.
axpy906 3y ago
This comment reminded me of South Park’s Panderverse for some reason.
beardedwizard 3y ago
Making all those awful Marvel and Star Wars movies and taking our money anyway was pretty mean too.
erellsworth 3y ago
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. They tried to use the IP to make money. Mean or not, I'd say it's also accurate. They tried to use the IP to make money... by wringing the life out of it. There are so many Marvel/Star Wars movies/tv shows now you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track.
- graphe 3y ago
  Religions don't wring up other religions by making more media of other religions.
  - erellsworth 3y ago
    WTF does religion have to do with this? I have no idea what you're trying to say.
    - graphe 3y ago
      You don't wring anything by making more media. It is a ridiculous idea to think.
      - erellsworth 3y ago
        You absolutely can wring something out by making too much of it. There's a reason "superhero fatigue" is a thing.
- pnutjam 3y ago
  Bingo, I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling like I can't start in the middle and it's impossible to track back to the first story or there are just way too many so I just give up and don't watch any. They did that with Pirates of the Caribbean first... I blinked and there were 5 of them.
- geodel 3y ago
  > you need a freaking spreadsheet to keep track. Still in luck, you are not yet in Hadoop domain :-)
babyshake 3y ago
> Wringing the life is a pretty mean way to put it. I take issue less with the volume of Star Wars and Marvel content, and more with how Disney makes small gestures toward "genre" while keeping all of that content within a tightly brand-controlled realm where there are no real stakes or diversity and everything needs to be canon. This is one of the areas where I can appreciate WB's approach more with having a variety of movies and shows with vastly different styles and audiences that obviously can't fit together in the same universe.
cpuguy83 3y ago
Andor is phenomenal at least.

sethd 3y ago

> and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. Mixing in a lot of foreign language content to make their library seem larger is a sad joke and one of the main reasons I no longer subscribe to Netflix. Edit for clarity: I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor. I can remember when Blockbuster and video rental stores would put all this in a foreign language section, which was then further broken down by genre.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Netflix’s foreign content is quite good. Especially the Korean stuff is pretty high quality and way cheaper to produce, seems like a good idea to me.
- sethd 3y ago
  I’m fine with foreign language content in general, as long as it’s categorized as such. The problem is how Netflix mixes it in with everything else in a deceptive manor.
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    What is foreign language for such a global service? If I am in Spain, should shows in English be bundled in a "Foreign Language" along with Korean dramas, Japanese animation, and a couple of odd series in Dutch? How is this helpful? Not saying that language categorization is a bad thing. Being able to filter shows that are available in a specific audio language, or with a specific language available for subtitles, would be a bad thing. But I seriously question the helpfulness of "English" and "Other"
    - sethd 3y ago
      I think the right approach would be to label content that is not in the source language you have set as your device locale. It’s not about filtering out the content, it’s about making it easy to tell whether or not it’s going to start playing with dubbed audio so the viewer can make a better choice.

ken47 3y ago

Do you have any first hand sources of Disney’s thought process and strategy as you’ve summarized them here? Calling Disney naive is bold.

aCoreyJ 3y ago

Disney really shouldn't even be included in the first sentence of this article, according to itself they have 8 million subscribers and are expecting to be profitable next year.

mhaberl 3y ago
With a subscriber base of 8 million, assuming hypothetically that each pays $15 monthly over an entire year (a figure which is inflated), the resultant annual _revenue_ would be approximately $1.4 billion. However, their financial losses this year have exceeded even this ($1.6 billion in first 9 months alone) Their projection of achieving profitability in the next fiscal year seems, under these circumstances, quite optimistic :)
- maxerickson 3y ago
  Disney also has Hulu and ESPN+. (They rolled up Hulu after acquiring a majority share with the purchase of Fox)
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    Oh, interesting. I'm surprised they haven't merged them / moved people over / shut down Hulu.
    - geodel 3y ago
      They have stake in Hulu, other partner is Comcast. So Disney can't just shut it down on their own.
      - maxerickson 3y ago
        They are in the process of selling it to Disney (following a 2019 deal giving them the option). https://deadline.com/2023/12/comcast-disney-hulu-mike-cavanagh-1235650499/ https://deadline.com/2023/12/comcast-disney-hulu-mike-cavana... To some extent, Disney are using it as their adult oriented streaming service in the US.

ksec 3y ago

>I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding I love this. I am not being sarcastic but the optimistic and somewhat enthusiasm of fundamental misunderstanding. >It’s a classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy I am old. But it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance. But then I also remember for more than 10 years the media went with the idea that "execution eats strategy for breakfast."

scruple 3y ago
> it still amaze me that "strategic thinking" is such a rare skill set with top executive while high efficiency executive are in abundance. How much money did the executive make while it took years for these strategies to fail? How much will they make from the golden parachute if they're actually fired for their failures? Is that really failure, relative to the executive?

fzeroracer 3y ago

Ultimately yeah, it's this. Netflix wins because it understands hanging your hat on one series or IP is business suicide. They churn out a bunch of shows, from higher budget big IPs to a bunch of lower budget series and animations. David Zaslav and other media execs wanted to try and force the old media philosophy in the streaming environment, which also meant executing a bunch of mid-budget and lower-budget series to try and save money. Except they also shot their only chance of following the actually successful model of Netflix.

steveBK123 3y ago
Yes because running NFLX, by comparison, is probably not as "fun" of a job as running a traditional media org. Imagine being in charge of IP you watched as a kid, mingling with famous actors & directors .. it's very sexy. It's a ticket to a different social life. A lot of them are larger than life personalities than come from media families. Netflix by comparison is like running any other FAANG. Pays well, but you can live a pretty rich-but-anonymous life still. I had to look up who was running NFLX these days, and one of the co-CEOs doesn't even have a picture on his Wiki page.
geodel 3y ago
Well Amazon shot many very expensive shows and they turned out to be crapola. The only thing favored Amazon studios was huge cash from Amazon so they could just be fine with all mega failures. So far lot of streaming shows are crappy in a way I can't quite put my finger on and its definitely not just about budget.
- skydhash 3y ago
  I believe it’s the writing. There is no soul in te dialogue and characterization always seems forced. Acting and set design may be good, but it feels like no one is giving a damn about the scenario
  - kyriakos 3y ago
    I feel the opposite for Netflix, which has better writing but worse acting, casting, costumes and generally plastic feeling on most of its original shows.

geraldwhen 3y ago

Disney could have done that and I would have paid. But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy. Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.

jl6 3y ago
All the old Disney back catalog is still new to my kids so they just watch that and ignore the new junk.
- dpflan 3y ago
  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?
- lolinder 3y ago
  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?
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    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.

RandomLensman 3y ago

Maybe Disney just needs to start charging Netflix prices?

dom96 3y ago

> The majority of people who buy streaming, I suspect, are interested mainly in the conveyor belt of diverse and engaging content. I'd love to see this backed up by sources. I for one recall seeing streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed. Anecdotally, I watch and rewatch a lot of old series. Like I'm rewatching Breaking Bad on Netflix right now.

dpflan 3y ago
It's definitely relative to some degree, X-Files is new content to people of a certain age.
scruple 3y ago
The perspective isn't "this is old" it's "think of all of the people born after $THING released, it's new to them."
lolinder 3y ago
> streaming stats from Disney+ and old series like X Files are up there as some of the most streamed. This doesn't contradict OP—Disney's new content is mostly bad, so it's unsurprising that on their platform people are watching older stuff. But would that have been true of Netflix before everything fragmented? And how many people aren't on Disney+ at all because they'd prefer to see new, good content and already finished what little Disney is putting out?
strunz 3y ago
Isn't Suits - a long since lapsed cable series - like the most popular thing on Netflix? So was Friends, Seinfeld, and The Office for a time too. People love to think they can generalize all streamers into a bucket when in reality it's not as simple as anyone thinks. Viewing trends change all the time and can be unpredictable, even horrible stuff gets tons of views.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  Apparently not: https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv https://www.netflix.com/tudum/top10/tv Top 10 is pretty dynamic. Longest item there was there for 6 weeks and is new content. Hilariously "Fireplace 4K: Crackling Birchwood from Fireplace for Your Home" beats out Squid Game.

ren_engineer 3y ago

Everybody wanted to control the entire pie, when in reality almost all of them would have been better off just licensing their content to Netflix and not worrying about streaming distribution

lolinder 3y ago
So much this. Netflix was valuable to me because I could watch any movie at any time, but now the streaming space is so fragmented that no single provider is worth the price of the subscription, so our family doesn't pay for any of them. We told ourselves that if we really want to watch movies we'd just rent them off Amazon on a case-by-case basis, but in practice we just completely stopped consuming streaming content as a family. If there are other families like us, then their greed made the whole pie much smaller.
- dimitrios1 3y ago
  I am in this boat as well. Our stream subscriptions are down to zero -- just the one I get for free with my cell carrier. And as for Disney and whatever the heck it is they have become, I have reverted back to purchasing purchased discs of any good movies or series.
  - Bendy 3y ago
    Same, and with my toddler we’re back to good old fashioned DVDs. They may be slower, fragile and have a few unskippable parts but at least the ads are predictable, they don’t involve endless scrolling, and they belong to you.
    - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      I kind of skipped the whole blue-ray thing, but is there a reason for DVD over blue-ray besides the price?
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I keep Netflix subscription most out of loyalty than anything else. I've had Amazon prime since it was first introduced but may drop it after the recent announcement. I also tend to rent from Amazon if it's not on netflix, but if it's on neither or I disagree with the rent price or they don't allow you to rent, I just pirate. I'm ok with them having my money, but once they started pulling everything off of netflix the entire landscape because anti-consumer. Their greed lost them my money.

apwell23 3y ago

> I think this primarily comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of where the value in streaming services lies from the perspective of old world media giants. > Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. If it was so fundamental and obvious like you state wouldn't you have been super rich by now by buying netflix stock when it crashed in 2022. Maybe you are ? Dominant narrative back then was that netflix is nothing specail. Building a stream app is a commodity that anyone can build and the old-world providers have content that people want to watch.

abracadaniel 3y ago
Everything was doom and gloom for Netflix as I remember it. They were wholly dependent on the licensed content that they will inevitably lose. I guess it turns out that becoming a studio is easier than becoming a streaming platform.
- skeeter2020 3y ago
  Netflix - The Studio is extremely sub-par, even by today's lacklustre standards. Sure, they have the occasional success; you throw enough garbage against the wall and something will stick.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  Either that or Netflix just did a better job than the studios did. Just because someone was more successful with one strategy than someone else was with a different strategy doesn't mean that the strategy is superior, they could just be a better overall player or even a worse player that happened to outmaneuver a better player, or, even, in the massive multiplayer battle royale that is our economy, a worse player that made bad decisions but happened to luck into ideal market conditions. I don't think Zoom did anything particularly revolutionary, their product just happened to be the exact right balance at the exact right time.
procrastitron 3y ago
Any argument of the form “if you knew that all along you’d be rich by now from playing the stock market” is fundamentally flawed because it overlooks one of the most well known dangers of the stock market: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent” It absolutely was obvious ahead of time that most of the competing streaming services would fail because they couldn’t possibly recreate the infrastructure of Netflix, but it was not possible to predict when they would fail. For a concrete example, before Paramount+ launched I predicted that it would be dead in less than a year. Clearly I was wrong because it’s still going 2 years later. I still think it will die relatively soon, but predicting exactly when is virtually impossible.

Tao3300 3y ago

> classic story of a tenant mistakenly believing the landlord has it easy - so they abandon their sublet and try to build a mall from scratch The Mall of Damocles

jonplackett 3y ago

It’s funny how crap the other streamers apps still are compared to Netflix. Little things matter. Netflix always picks up the exact second you left a show. Apple, Disney and prime sometimes jump back 5 minutes or even more. Netflix app opens super fast even in my crap old smart TV. Apple, Disney, prime take ages. Even when open the UI is very sloppy. Netflix adjusts the streaming quality depending on your connection. Which means things download fast / stream reliably and also presumable saves them a tonne of bandwidth. An then they actually have good content too…

upon_drumhead 3y ago
Prime never remembers when I finish an episode correctly. It’s always a few minutes from the end or even forgotten I watched it at all. It’s a mess to pick up a new season and struggle with, did I actually watch the complete last season?
thefounder 3y ago
Netflix streaming looks worst on my 150" screen. Some shows are watchables but some are simply junk bitrate wise to the point I get huge posterisation effects/pixels. The quality of the content itself is another issue. For movies I just get the disk and store it forever with r.volution NAS(aka old zappiti NAS)
- cpuguy83 3y ago
  4K at 150" would look like crap. Do any streaming services support 8K? That is a lot of bandwidth and decode overhead.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    >4K at 150" would look like crap I mean it would really depend how close you're sitting to the screen, wouldn't it?
    - cpuguy83 3y ago

lolinder 3y ago

Netflix's secret starting in their DVD days was to provide a service that had way more variety than Blockbuster, so that no matter who you were, the movies you wanted to watch would be available. Disney especially was arrogant enough to assume that they controlled all the IP that people actually want to watch, so they thought they could just pull out of Netflix and everyone would switch. But that's not how movie preferences work. There's no brand loyalty, there are movies (and shows) people like and movies they don't, and each person's set of preferred movies is unique and spread out across studios. Disney isn't Apple.

geodel 3y ago
To be honest I give credit to consumers to puncture Disney's inflated ego and bring them down to earth. If a minimum threshold of folks kept hankering for Disney's content to keep them in good financial condition they'd remain arrogant as ever.
dham 3y ago
You also have to be willing to be put out good content that isn't written by ChatGPT, which, as we've seen, Disney has been unable to do for quite some time.

clwg 3y ago

On the flip side, the old content is exactly what I want. I'm a big fan of Star Trek, including TNG, Voyager, DS9, and even Enterprise. If I play music while I work, I find myself getting distracted by it. So, I prefer to have Star Trek playing in the background since I've seen every episode multiple many times it's really just comforting background competence porn. Other than that, I don't really watch much TV but it's nice to have if I'm bored. In the last year, I've had to switch streaming providers four times to access this catalogue. I've moved from Netflix to Paramount to Crave (I'm in Canada) and now I'm back on Netflix. For Christmas, I bought myself a Mini PC and a subscription to Proton VPN. At this point, I've spent enough money on Star Trek and a small amount of movies that I don't feel the moral issues I would if I were pirating indie games or something similar.

kshacker 3y ago
Voyager was one series I never completed before the streaming roulette started. Not sure how I started looking for it but I finally said no thanks to subs and bought a box set for 50 bucks. I can watch at my own pace and don't have to shell out 10-25 bucks every month. Have seen DS9 but may do the same there since the price (50 bucks) is so compelling as compared to streaming monthly costs, and you get to keep it forever (forever defined by some arbitrary parameter and not equal to infinity)
graphe 3y ago
Why stream when you can either buy/torrent old media? I don't see a point to streaming when its more efficient to buy or download.
- iteria 3y ago
  Because buy doesn't exist in a sane form for some things. Kids shows are known for never selling by season and only by some weird theme and of course there are dupes between sets. Buy isn't an option at all for some stuff. I'm looking at you Disney vault bulkshit, but also other not as iconic stuff. Yes pirate, but that's a problem too. I've tried to pirate some stuff that wasn't popular or it was too old and you're just not able to. Streaming removes a lot of that hassle. Now that the price is becoming too high, people are considering other options, but there is a reason it exists. Streaming is how I let my kids explore media. Yes, I can just give them my childhood favs, but they need a way to try new shows without me directly interfering and it's been great. I would have never picked out my kid's favs for her.

l1tany11 3y ago

I don’t think “beaming 4k video around the world” is really an issue at all. The way the internet works, with peering etc. bandwidth is super, super cheap. It’s basically too cheap to meter. AWS bandwidth pricing has no relationship to actual bandwidth costs and never did. Netflix has for years been operating open connect, basically they place proxy servers with ISPs (effectively a peering type arrangement). In 2021 Netflix said they spent $1B worldwide on open connect over the previous 10 years. But they spent $19B last year on “cost of revenue” which basically means content. $20B a year on content. $0.1B a year on their CDN. I can’t imagine Disney, Comcast, etc is much different.

LanzVonL 3y ago

Disney has admitted they aren't trying to please Star Wars fans. Amazon has admitted they aren't trying to please Tolkien fans. Fans already consider these new developments of timeless classics to be non-canon no matter who technically owns the rights. It'll be a lesson taught in brand management for eons, until the heat death of the sun - don't acquire a property which is only valuable because of fans, just to discard the very thing that gives it value - the fans. They truly will learn their lessons, or somebody else will.

dham 3y ago
This. I've always wondered why these companies are trying to create content for audiences that literally don't exist. It's really only shown up in the last few. years.
- LanzVonL 3y ago
  They're government supported, is my guess. There's no profit motive so everybody can do whatever they want.

tetromino_ 3y ago

> Meanwhile Netflix has built some of the most sophisticated production tooling in the world, and leveraged cross-country content like no old-world provider ever has. I stopped subscribing to Netflix around 2 years ago because that "sophisticated production tooling" was producing almost purely garbage tier content. With the exception of Black Mirror, there were no compelling new shows - and Black Mirror on its own was not worth the monthly subscription.

harimau777 3y ago

I think that part of the problem might be that streaming no longer reliably supplies the old classics. I would likely pay for a service where when someone says "You haven't seen X? It's a classic!" I could reliably watch it. However, in practice the classics are spread across so many different services that none of them are worth subscribing to.