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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

#121

Post by Supermancho »

scarface74 wrote: post #40
aarpmcgee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that it doesn’t count because you assume everyone has a Prime subscription?

It’s estimated that 62% of households in the US have Prime subscriptions. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/new-survey-estimates-amazon-pr...

Amazon Prime Video is not the same as Amazon Prime and Amazon Prime has nowhere near 62% (since 101m is less than 1/3 of the US population). If we're talking "households", that doesn't pan out either since the average US household has 2.6 people, right now. I would be willing to say these numbers aren't concrete, but they are closer to the ballpark of reality than a 62% market penetration when I can ask all my coworkers at a well-known company and 25% have Amazon Prime...and these are people with disposable income that allows for it as opposed to people working out of an airport in Minnesota.

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

#122

Post by echelon »

TrunkleBob wrote: post #115
mrfusion wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good idea except I don’t like phoning up companies to cancel.

I've canceled (and later resubscribed) to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon without ever picking up the phone.

This is easy now. Just wait until retention starts hurting their bottom line.

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

#123

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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.

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

For the same total amount of content produced, they could give everyone access to all of it for the same total revenue they receive now and the only thing that would change is that everyone would have access to all of it.

You don't make more money by having only 20% of the customers even if it means you don't have to share the revenue with four other studios. You make less, because having access to some of the content isn't worth as much as having access to all of the content, so the industry as a whole is providing less value and consequently doing less business.

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

#124

Post by Teever »

scarface74 wrote: post #41
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…

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?

The government built this market! It wouldn't exist without copyright law or the perpetual extension of it!

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

#125

Post by bastardoperator »

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…

Verizon digital media is a backend CDN for over half the companies you listed. They’re betting the future of the entire company on cord cutters.

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

#126

Post by mattmaroon »

scarface74 wrote: post #8
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.

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 think what you're describing is squarely in the realm of content quality. They're spending large amounts of money and getting content that's largely junk, and even when it's good, it's buried under so much junk that it's hard to find. HBO spends 1/7th of what they do and has better shows. Netflix has spent billions trying to get one Game of Thrones and failed miserably.

That's what's killing subscriber growth. Lack of quality content. HBO has about the same number of subscribers, at a 50% higher subscription cost. The revenue is there to be had for someone with good enough content.

Despite spending $10b a year, Netflix's biggest shows are still ones it licenses (Friends, The Office, etc.) and they're losing them one by one. They've shown that for whatever reason, quality content isn't a problem you can solve by spending alone.

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

#127

Post by dillonmckay »

echelon wrote: post #122
TrunkleBob wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've canceled (and later resubscribed) to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon without ever picking up the phone.

This is easy now. Just wait until retention starts hurting their bottom line.

YAGNI

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

#128

Post by hkmurakami »

RoyTyrell wrote: post #105
ravenstine wrote: post #16

While his position is [partly] accurate, it's not exactly revelatory. People, notably internet pirates, were saying this 20 years ago. People are going to get fed up if they've got to pay for dozens of streaming services to get all the shows that they want. On top of that, a lot of these platforms are still shoving ads in our faces. If streaming manages to become worse than cable, people might just spend less time wa…

> People are going to get fed up if they've got to pay for dozens of streaming services to get all the shows that they wa I agree. You start paying $70 for internet, $15 to Netflix, $15 to Disney, $10 to Hulu and really you're back to where you were with cable. I think having a couple offerings in the universe is great for competition reasons, but I will not spend the equivalent of a cable bill to get most of what I…

At least it’s video on demand now. I still can’t even watch time delayed sporting events on xfinity’s atreaming thing.

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

#129

Post by dillonmckay »

dehrmann wrote: post #110
barkerja wrote: post #27

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. Why does it work for music, though?

I think it comes down to simple economics of delivery and media costs (both time and money).

We would be having a different conversation if I could have a thumbdrive w enough storage capacity to hold the entire Disney catalog for $35.

This makes even more sense if my ISP charges per GB. Why should I pay for duplicate transfer of data?

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

#130

Post by rgoulter »

RoyTyrell wrote: post #105
ravenstine wrote: post #16

While his position is [partly] accurate, it's not exactly revelatory. People, notably internet pirates, were saying this 20 years ago. People are going to get fed up if they've got to pay for dozens of streaming services to get all the shows that they want. On top of that, a lot of these platforms are still shoving ads in our faces. If streaming manages to become worse than cable, people might just spend less time wa…

> People are going to get fed up if they've got to pay for dozens of streaming services to get all the shows that they wa I agree. You start paying $70 for internet, $15 to Netflix, $15 to Disney, $10 to Hulu and really you're back to where you were with cable. I think having a couple offerings in the universe is great for competition reasons, but I will not spend the equivalent of a cable bill to get most of what I…

If there are only a couple of different offerings, it makes sense to think "I'm going to subscribe to 1-3 of these every month".

I think with a more fragmented streaming services, it's easier to get into the mindset of "Which shows do I want to watch? I want to watch these shows in 2-3 months by subscribing to these". PITA compared to having one or two streaming services which have almost everything; but, cheaper than "subscribe just in case there's something to watch".

I don't mind watching shows way after they release, though.

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