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Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

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Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#41
post #21
post #11

Amazon, Apple, Disney, HBO Max, Hulu, Peacock, ..., oh, and Netflix. How many monthly memberships are people going to want to pay for, especially when there is already a huge library of free content on YouTube? Interesting times...

This is strictly worse than cable. Streaming in the 2010s was a breath of fresh air. You could find everything on one platform, watch it at your leisure, and pay way less than cable. Now we're going to have to pay more AND switch between nine different apps with broken UIs. This is god awful. All of this because of greed and a lack of regulation. We need to campaign for limited copyright (20 years), and build service…

Yet another post on HN about a company that needs to be broken up because they are big in some made up market. Now are we going to define a monopoly as the “Pop Culture” market.

Would you also like the government to “build a market” so that everyone can have all the software they want and have the government decide what a fair amount for software is?

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#42

I think Disney+ will be more successful than anyone can imagine. I don't know how Netflix will survive when the competition of Disney+ and HBO Max will have 95% of the best tv shows and movies.

Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big r…

I agree with this analysis. Netflix-created content is hit-or-miss, and generally miss IMO. I honestly keep the subscription alive today for the same reason I started it in the first place, all those years ago - to have on-demand access to old Star Trek TV shows (TNG-ENT). If they drop those shows, I'll drop them.

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#43
post #11

Amazon, Apple, Disney, HBO Max, Hulu, Peacock, ..., oh, and Netflix. How many monthly memberships are people going to want to pay for, especially when there is already a huge library of free content on YouTube? Interesting times...

Disney owns ESPN, a controlling stake in Hulu, Marvel, Lucas Films, Pixar, Disney Animation, and 20th century fox (FX, fox searchlight, many classic movie franchises, X-Men, Fantastic 4, etc). I'm probably missing something. I imagine that Disney will eventually sell a mega subscription service that bundles all of their media. HBO Max will have all HBO content (obviously), all Warner Bros content, the CW (you know al…

Disney controls 100% of Hulu now and can own the entire stake by 2024 when their deal with Comcast comes up for decision.

Disney is already doing a bundle for ESPN+, Hulu, Disney+. The Hulu is the lower priced ad one, but still, they’re already mostly there with an ultimate streaming bundle.

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I'd go as far to say it's worse. Cable forced one's hand into paying for things they didn't necessarily want. At least with this model, we the consumer have the ability to pick and choose exactly what we want to pay for. If a network has shows that look appealing to you, subscribe for a couple months. If there's only one show that looks appealing, buy it on iTunes. We're never going to have an afforda…

> We're never going to have an affordable, legal, pay-once-for-everything model. That possibility is a huge market failure. The demand is there.

How can you have access to all content while keeping it affordable? Cable was “everything” but it wasn’t affordable. Movie and TV Content is expensive to produce, can’t have it all for $10/month.

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big…

I think you are contradicting yourself here. If the quality was good they wouldn't have mentioned not having big releases as being the reason why their subscriber growth was slow. No, I’m saying that Disney’s library content has value and doesn’t have to be hit driven to be successful. If Netflix’s only way of gaining customers is by keep getting in debt to fund new content, it has an unsustainably high customer acqu…

Disney is hit driven in that all their things are mostly either for entire families or four quadrant sort of mainstream hit-style media. Which is most of their historical content library.

Netflix actually has a lot of quality original shows. All modern as they are all from this decade.

People want hits though, so that isn’t helping Netflix enough.

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#46

I think Disney+ will be more successful than anyone can imagine. I don't know how Netflix will survive when the competition of Disney+ and HBO Max will have 95% of the best tv shows and movies.

Hopefully Netflix survives. They’ve created so many quality original shows or continued them in the past 5+ years. It’s nice to have that as a difference to the other major companies. From traditional media, HBO, FX, and AMC don’t make that many shows. Though their general quality is there with Netflix (Netflix having more miss and niche things since it has so much more new original content).

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to do anything. You just feel the need to watch everything that can be watched. If you don't want to pay for every service, you should just reset your expectations.

That's not how it works. For one, it's the age-old anticonsumer situation, but a fully distributed edition. People value movies and shows by title, not by distributor. Platforms aggregate orthogonally to that. The end result is, even if you ranked all the movies/shows by how much you wanted to that and restricted yourself to top 10, you'll likely end up having to subscribe to all the mainstream platforms to get them.…

Entertainment is not really pop culture and is diverse enough these days, thanks to the internet, that you can easily not find a single tv show or a movie to talk about with someone.

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#48
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is strictly worse than cable. Streaming in the 2010s was a breath of fresh air. You could find everything on one platform, watch it at your leisure, and pay way less than cable. Now we're going to have to pay more AND switch between nine different apps with broken UIs. This is god awful. All of this because of greed and a lack of regulation. We need to campaign for limited copyright (20 years), and build service…

Yet another post on HN about a company that needs to be broken up because they are big in some made up market. Now are we going to define a monopoly as the “Pop Culture” market. Would you also like the government to “build a market” so that everyone can have all the software they want and have the government decide what a fair amount for software is?

Disney films are generic, cookie cutter formulas designed for mass appeal and ROI. They buy everything they can and then force theaters to show their films in the most desirable weekend spots. They're soaking up all the money and pushing the smaller players out.

They're now trying to eat Netflix.

Not to mention that they follow Beijing's content directives.

We should take a serious look at balancing the scales.

If we expired Star Wars' copyright after 20 years, others could use the license and develop their own take. Disney would be forced to innovate and pursue new IP creation. It would be good for competition.

This is just my own thought on the matter. Maybe it's wrong. I happen to think it would improve the status quo and actually result in market growth as you'd need new to hire more creatives. Novel content in turn results in more interest.

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're never going to have an affordable, legal, pay-once-for-everything model. That possibility is a huge market failure. The demand is there.

How can you have access to all content while keeping it affordable? Cable was “everything” but it wasn’t affordable. Movie and TV Content is expensive to produce, can’t have it all for $10/month.

>How can you have access to all content while keeping it affordable

Media companies could stop over pricing their content

Re: Disney: Bob Iger bets the company (and Hollywood's future) on streaming

#50
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet another post on HN about a company that needs to be broken up because they are big in some made up market. Now are we going to define a monopoly as the “Pop Culture” market. Would you also like the government to “build a market” so that everyone can have all the software they want and have the government decide what a fair amount for software is?

Disney films are generic, cookie cutter formulas designed for mass appeal and ROI. They buy everything they can and then force theaters to show their films in the most desirable weekend spots. They're soaking up all the money and pushing the smaller players out. They're now trying to eat Netflix. Not to mention that they follow Beijing's content directives. We should take a serious look at balancing the scales. If we…

Every commercial product is designed for maximum ROI.

They buy everything they can and then force theaters to show their films in the most desirable weekend spots.

You really think movie theaters would rather show movies that don’t fill it?

They're soaking up all the money and pushing the smaller players out.

Ever heard of Blumhouse? Their entire business model is to make low budget movies that cost under $10 million and they usually have a higher ROI than Disney movies.

If we expired Star Wars' copyright after 20 years, others could use the license and develop their own take. Disney would be forced to innovate and pursue new IP creation. It would be good for competition.

Why not force other people to innovate instead of building on top of Star Wars?

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