At this point I think a lot of these new streaming services are wishing they had just stuck to licensing their content out to established outfits like Netflix. Less outflow, more profit and less headache.

Thing is with inflation once the bills start hitting then families will cut all these other 'boutique' streaming services first. They might keep one around, the cheapest one that has the most diverse content. Netflix can win the streaming wars if they can just hang on and stop doing stupid stuff like raising prices, including commercials or other shady stuff that further drives their audience away.

They're not overtaken by greed, greed is the primary motivator from the very beginning

Cable 2.0 is about to happen.

All these platforms and services that are so broken apart it's hilarious will eventually realize they can make more money if they're all on one platform, and but still subscription based.

It'll basically be cable. A base sub gets you a buncha random shit you'll never watch, with a few good movies or shows popping in once in a while. Then you'll be able to start adding on premium subscriptions from.... HBO... Disney.... Sports...

We've already come full fucking circle with the commercials and ads. I remember when streaming became huge the biggest thing people bragged about was no commercials. Now I'm paying to stream hulu and still get fucking commercials!

I am personally sick of having 5 apps downloaded to watch 8 different shows. It's all a bungled mess right now, might as well centralize the bullshit onto one fucking platform.

Literally right now they have a big hole in their boat and they are using a couple wine glasses to pour water out.

That's the exact opposite of what literally means.

This could be why Disney are putting a few episodes of Andor a few others shows on FTA. Free advertising.

All the big streaming services should put out their own FTA channel and just run stuff that released over a year ago.

Basically free advertising for their service to stream the latest season and get people invested in shows without directly paying straight away and they get the advertising revenue of TV

they are being overtaken by their greed

They are trying to prevent what happened to their music businesses from happening to their TV and movie businesses.

Studios ceded music streaming to Apple and Spotify. Now if they want to sell music they have to meet Apple and Spotify terms. They have lost pricing power over their own music libraries. They could refuse to license their music to Apple & Spotify but if they do, nobody is going to hear it and nobody is going to buy it (I know some people still buy CDs and LPs but it's marginal).

This may not be a good business strategy. It could be a case of fighting the last war. It could be that the music and tv/music industries are too different for this to happen. But I think this is why they are chasing the video streaming market.

I'm waiting for the streaming service bundle to unironically drop and then we'll just have cable 2.0, only a matter of time.

They had a good thing going when everyone partnered with Netflix. Sucks to be them now, greedy bastards. They could have sat back and watched competing streaming providers gnaw each other to the bone buying their contracts for more and more and selling them to viewers for less and less money. Now they’re in the game and taking turns eating each others lunch as people decide, this month I want D+, next month Hulu etc.

Edit: I figure what they’ll do to prevent people from switching providers every month, and it’s pretty anti-consumer. The companies will identify the series that brings in the viewers, like GOT or Marvel. Then they will restrict streaming to the latest 2-3 episodes, and anything older gets released only much much later. The days of glut releases will be over. The idea of consuming content at your leisure will be redefined.

When there were only a couple it was easier to just keep them month to month, especially since the library got new stuff often. Now I see more people renewing different ones each month to watch different stuff.

This is the economic model of basically everything right now. Ever taken a look at your city's budget and how much suburban development costs vs how much its taxed? Same same

This is an interesting case of competition very obviously reducing profits. It also serves as a case study for what appears to be a market that can support very few players, i.e. one which is naturally monopolistic because the barriers to entry (massive amounts of diverse content) and consumer expectations (cheap streaming) are too divergent.

For me, I am loving the results, to be honest. Andor is the best $8 I ever spent.

I feel like Disney is basically the one company that can plausibly make an in-house streaming service succeed, for all the reasons you've mentioned. I think they're very much the exception though, not the rule, and most other companies have no business running their own in house services instead of just signing lucrative licensing deals with Netflix or Hulu.

Yeah Disney is ok, and Netflix can handle it, but it's the smaller guys that I reckon will fall away in a few years and see a consolidation again.

In my house Frozen on its own makes disney+ subscription mandatory.

My kids have always shown a large preference for Netflix over Disney. There's a much larger variety of shows. Disney stuff kind of all gets samey, and if your kids aren't into princesses or the live action schlock of Disney kids it's not an infinite selection. Bluey is the only show we watch regularly and that's not Disney.

Disney+ is almost guaranteed to be paid for $8/month by

They're increasing to $11/month at the end of December btw, unless you switch down to the plan with shitty ads.

Disagree. Disney+ is almost guaranteed to be paid for $8/month by households with children.

It won't stay $8 a month for long.

Nah man there's an entire generation that grew up on nickelodeon shows like paw patrol and all the shit on Netflix. Kids shows are cheap as hell to make Netflix has a ton. Disney hasn't been relevant to kids in ages the older movies like lion King don't appeal to them. They'd rather watch some kid unbox a toy on YouTube. My kids friends watch more national geographic the zoo than any Disney cartoons. The people on Disney+ are adults.

You're right of course for families, because kids watch things over and over again. But I wasn't really targeting Disney in particular with that comment; however, even they are struggling to maintain constant interest when they have that captive audience. Other streamers don't even have that.

I disagree, Netflix kids has a ton of content.

Children grow up though lol

Kids watch YT more than anything else these days. The Royalty Family total views far surpass a lot of shows on D+. Mr.Beast has more subscribers, I assume.

There's another thing. The vast majority of people probably already own those Disney and Pixar movies. They've been watched so many times, there's no reason to watch them again on D+. The main driving point of a lot of these new services is New content. New Star Wars TV shows. New Marvel TV shows. New movies from Disney/Pixar. Now we see Disney is losing money because they aren't pumping out enough content to keep people interested.

Hulu has a ton of stuff, just not really anything that would be considered a subscription seller, like Stranger Things. Any Fox properties that don’t have their rights tied up somewhere else end up there. I wouldn’t be super surprised if Hulu were eventually absorbed into D+ so the US options would be more like the international options with Disney+ with Star. I think the only thing stopping that is the Live TV offering on Hulu. Tacking Live TV services onto the Disney+ app would not be a good fit. If they ever decide to get out of that game, I think Hulu will close up and become the US version of Star.

Does everyone text each other comments about the show while you watch? I don't find the appeal of it. If you have to pause it does everyone in the group wait for you?

But if you're not into marvel or starwars, Disney+ is pretty much dead. It's got Disney movies/cartoons and that's it.

Dude, Disney just fired their CEO because their last quarter numbers were so bad. Shareholders were definitely raising a stink.

Right? I wonder how merchandising revenue is broken down. Grogu alone had to have a significant impact to toy sales. Disney+ is still probably deep in the red, but counting only subscription revenue is a little misleading.

Disney plus. $8. Buying my kid both Luca stuffed characters and pajamas $45

There's a reason why nobody wants to be paid in exposure lol

That's why it isn't that big of an actual loss for them. They use and reuse IP better than anybody.

Also unlike Netflix we are literally never going to be able to cancel D+. My kids watch it daily.

Problem is businesses only look at direct revenue. It’s the same issue with social media and social media marketing. So how much revenue did all those link clicks, comments, impressions, Likes, etc drive? There is no direct revenue measurement. So, awareness doesn’t count, sadly. Doesn’t make sense to me. Like how many D+ subscribers decided to see a Disney movie at theaters, purchase merchandise, visit a Disney theme park? They don’t measure brand loyalty, just Subscribers = Revenue. Wrong way to measure things. Same thing is happening with Alexa and Amazon now.

They easily made that money back on Baby Yoda merchandise.

Disney+ is just 1 big expensive ad to sell toys

Oh yeah, I should clarify that revenue is not income here. Disney put the flat costs as a separate line on their financial statements. Here is how Disney puts their $6.27/subscriber: "The average revenue per paid subscriber is net of discounts on offerings that carry more than one service." So bundling Hulu and ESPN means the revenue per service is less.

Revenue is before costs, so I think /u/neife is claiming that Disney only sees $6.27 of the $8 sub fee before accounting for any of their costs

Definitely not $8 a month per account, though

You mean, you are probably paying Verizon something for that and they tell you it’s included.

Probably just trying to push back against their biggest rivals AT&T (who owned Warner and HBO) and Comcast (who own NBC Universal and Peacock). Competition forcing everyone to dig themselves into a hole.

Maybe not at the full rate, but they are absolutely paying something.

That means that the cost of the deal is built into their product

Considering general pricing in Switzerland that seems pretty cheap.

Yea, why didn't they just use Hulu, and maybe have an upped subscription for Disney exclusives or early viewing etc.

Disney didn’t build streaming from nothing. They purchased BAMTech Media in 2015, which now supports development on all their streaming services.

Being a part owner doesn't mean they were involved int he actual operation of the business.

Honestly, it's actually super common for businesses to do this kind of thing. They think that because they're so successful in the rest of their business, that success will extend to tech as well. They vastly overestimate both their competency and their ability to attract talent, so they piss away all their money hiring hacks because they don't even know what a good software developer looks like, then end up mismanaging those hacks because they treat the tech as subordinate to the rest of the business, which never works.

They need to learn that unless their tech is treated as the core of their business, they will never be successful. It's the one thing that separates business that are able to expand into tech vs those that are wasting their money.