Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hollywoodreporter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 187 posts

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

#61

Post by scarface74 »

cortesoft wrote: post #59
scarface74 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney’s definition of success and Netflix’s definition of success is completely different. Disney doesn’t have to depend on subscription revenue to fund its streaming content. It’s already made money on most of its content by the time it gets to Disney+. It’s just an additional revenue stream. Netflix lives or dies by being able to create or license content at one price and sell it via subscription revenue at a high…

Except we are still expected to pay for each one as if they were a product... the only one that is really treated like a feature is amazon prime streaming... it is one part of being a prime member. All the others are sold as stand alone products you have to individually pay for.

In the case of Dropbox - the alternative OneDrive is a feature. For the price of Dropbox’s 1TB of storage, you can get a complete O365 subscription for six users and a combined 6TB of storage.

But it’s almost impossible to have a sustainable business when your larger competitors can price your “product” at just above break even as a bundled offering and a platform play.

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

#62

Post by scarface74 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #46
friedman23 wrote: post #5

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).

Netflix hasn’t produced anything as a company. They don’t have an internal culture or system to produce content like Pixar. They just pay production companies for exclusives. Any other players could pay the same studios and producers.

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

#63

Post by cortesoft »

scarface74 wrote: post #61
cortesoft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we are still expected to pay for each one as if they were a product... the only one that is really treated like a feature is amazon prime streaming... it is one part of being a prime member. All the others are sold as stand alone products you have to individually pay for.

In the case of Dropbox - the alternative OneDrive is a feature. For the price of Dropbox’s 1TB of storage, you can get a complete O365 subscription for six users and a combined 6TB of storage. But it’s almost impossible to have a sustainable business when your larger competitors can price your “product” at just above break even as a bundled offering and a platform play.

I understand what your point is, I am saying that only amazon currently does that with its streaming service.

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

#64

Post by skinnymuch »

scarface74 wrote: post #62
skinnymuch wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Netflix hasn’t produced anything as a company. They don’t have an internal culture or system to produce content like Pixar. They just pay production companies for exclusives. Any other players could pay the same studios and producers.

Maybe. It’s not really comparable to such a specific studio like Pixar though. There’s plenty of talk before that talent likes Netflix. And not just because of the money being given out either. The culture of financiers is going to matter in some capacity. No other company is doing or has done what Netflix is doing either. Netflix is spending the most alongside Disney. But Netflix was already branching off with their original content years ago when their budget was at least not as enormous as it is now. Like all their foreign language originals.

Pixar is amazing. But it isn’t without warts either. The Cars franchise and releasing two movies in one year with The Good Dinosaur bombing as a result.

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

#65

Post by skinnymuch »

scarface74 wrote: post #54
skinnymuch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not making a value judgment on the “quality” of Netflix’s content vs Disney’s. I’m only talking about business models. Netflix’s business model isn’t competitive by any objective measure.

Four quadrant media/tent-pole media isn’t what all hits are, but it is true for a lot of them. I was assuming quality in that regard.

I don’t see any media company including Comcast’s media companies being close to Disney and runner up Warner in terms of content. Which is basically business model at this point. Netflix can’t compare to Disney, but all the other media companies can’t either. They are going to have to do something as well.

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

#66

Post by scarface74 »

skinnymuch wrote: post #64
scarface74 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix hasn’t produced anything as a company. They don’t have an internal culture or system to produce content like Pixar. They just pay production companies for exclusives. Any other players could pay the same studios and producers.

Maybe. It’s not really comparable to such a specific studio like Pixar though. There’s plenty of talk before that talent likes Netflix. And not just because of the money being given out either. The culture of financiers is going to matter in some capacity. No other company is doing or has done what Netflix is doing either. Netflix is spending the most alongside Disney. But Netflix was already branching off with their…

The Cars franchise does suck, but that’s not the point. Cars made its money back and allows Disney to market toys, theme park attractions, home video, and now gives it more content for Disney+.

That’s one of Disney’s corporate strengths. Yes it’s sad.

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

#67

Post by sosborn »

grawprog wrote: post #2

>including all 30 seasons of The Simpsons; Never thought I'd see the day when a Disney service would air the Simpsons. The idea of the simpsons airing on the disney channel back in the day would have been ridiculous. Seems so strange to go from being considered one of the most notorious shows around to being carried by Disney. The very antithesis of what it was when it started. Not sure what that says more about thou…

I think says volumes about how our social norms have changed. Remember, today’s decision makers grew up on the Simpsons.

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

#68

Post by megaremote »

basch wrote: post #57
whyenot wrote: 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...

CBS/Viacom/Paramount/Nickelodeon/Showtime. Sony. Disney/Hulu/ESPN count as one, though you can buy smaller packages. ViacomCBS, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, and Disney will still be the big 4 of all the ones you listed. Amazon, Apple, and Netflix have minuscule content libraries by comparison. After people binge through new shows, the big 4 will be the ones holding all the old content. Netflix cant afford to produce co…

> After people binge through new shows, the big 4 will be the ones holding all the old content.

Do most people really want that old content? Apart from a few shows, I say no.

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

#69

Post by anoncake »

jeromegv wrote: post #44
TeMPOraL wrote: post #33

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.

The marginal cost of watching something is neglible. The only reasonable outcome is everyone being able to access everything, anything else is a huge market failure.

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

#70

Post by anoncake »

basch wrote: post #51
echelon wrote: 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…

>Now we're going to have to pay more AND switch between nine different apps with broken UIs. Roku, Fire, Apple all make it easy to search and browse for a show and then deep link into the correct app. It's not perfect, and I hope it will get better, but you are not currently forced to open the apps. Fire goes a step further and lets you play videos you are licensed to right out of the fire interface, without the app…

> Has a company ever been broken up for its library of content?

There's a first time for everything.

Post reply on HN