Hard to argue with any of the points offered in the article, but I wouldn't count Netflix out just yet. I agree it will be a long uphill battle, that may have to end with a hugely profitable Fortune 100 taking on Netflix's debt load.
If they fail, they could always open a movie studio. I mean Netflix originals are some of the best shows and movies around... Dead like me, Stranger Things, Haunting of hill House, The OA, Sex Ed, etc just to name a few...
I loved the end to S2 of The OA. Marling/Batmangli are may be the most creative and innovative writing duo in TV today. Amazingly thought-provoking stuff.
These are $10/month subs which are akin to channel packages. Just because some will also sub to the Disney chan package doesn't mean they'll drop Netflix. Would surprise no one if the author were shorting Netflix.
It also doesnt mean nobody will drop Netflix. If you are paying money to Netflix and you are consistently not finding the content you expect to watch, you are going to question the value of your subscription. Some will cancel if they find the value too low.
This article has incredible annoying spacing (one sentence per paragraph). Is this meant to read like an unrolled Twitter thread?
Content wise: I recently cancelled my Netflix again because despite a flood of new shows, all feel incredibly generic and formulaic. I like shows across genres, from teenage romance to sitcom to thriller, and I am looking forward to watching e.g. Narcos new season when it hits, there are also great one-offs like Maniac.
I just don't believe in the strategy of flooding their platform with their own content at this volume. Or rather, the type of content. If I remember correctly, plots and artistic decisions are made by committee, and it just shows very hard how plots are made to be subtly educational, not offend, just a lowest common denominator of what the data says.
Not sure it works. After finding myself browsing through too many evenings in a row, I always cancel until something I know I want returns for a new season, then resubscribe for a month.
Same here. I find myself going from series to series trying to find something that captivates me, and nothing sticks. I thought I was goingd to watch more Netflix now that Thrones is over but it is the opposite. I expect more and Netflix isnt delivering so I will cancel my subscription soo .
A 5-episode series of Black Mirror every year isnt going to cut it. I honestly dont know why they dont release an episode a week. Its pure laziness on their part, imo. Make the consumers happy. stop pushing out random junk that doesn’t stick and double down on what works.
After finding myself browsing through too many evenings in a row, I always cancel until something I know I want returns for a new season, then resubscribe for a month.
I find myself doing this with my Hulu subscription. They have a built-in hold function that pauses your account for up to 12 weeks. Since I typically watch shows in bulk (or binge), only having the subscription active one out of every four months works well.
The next step I'd like to take would be to only have a single streaming service active each month.
Hmm maybe a startup idea there. Help a user plan out what to watch over six months or a year and subscribe and cancel subscriptions for them behind the scenes so they get a cheap and also seamless viewing experience.
They’re impressing the hell out of me recently here, especially with the announcement that they’re helping produce another season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
I don’t think Netflix has something for everyone these days, but they are really hitting certain niches out of the park and will be just fine as long as they keep this core subscriber base. Especially hard sci-fi that almost everybody else has given up on.
Same here: I paid more than a year of subscription just to watch 3-4 decent TV series of ~ 12 hours each (some even shorter): 10 EURO/month for 3-4 hours of watching.
There is a lot of content out there, most of it is brain damaging to see.
> If I remember correctly, plots and artistic decisions are made by committee
This is an extremely important point, needs to be backed up with some citation.
It's the exact condemnation of "the suits" making decisions in cable's heyday. FWIW, I've heard the opposite, that Netflix has an almost completely hands-off approach -- the Netflix execs find creators and give them a budget, then move on to finding their next creator. I don't know if that has any more truth, but I'm inclined to think so.
Eehh - who clings to a single provider? In my family we jump around among iTunes, HBO Nordic, Viaplay and Netflix. I assume we will add Disney+ as well. Where exactly is the disruption?
if Netflix were smart they'd try to push a network package deal -- where you can signup for disney, hbo, amazon, through netflix and they take $2 or something off each subscription as incentive, users get single billing for all streaming, you'd pay the normal price or maybe get $5 off if you buy all networks for like $50 or $60. disney, hbo, amazon still get their $$ but Netflix makes some off the top, could be all the providers network and create the same deal for each other, but whoever sells & bills the packaged deal gets the extra $2-3 kickbacks.
I doubt this has anything to do with Netflix being "smart".
If anything it looks like Disney may be trying to execute this exact strategy in the future. Look at how they refused to participate in UltraViolet and eventually got most of the other major movie companies to quit supporting UV and join the Disney-owned Movies Anywhere service instead.
I doubt they would play ball with such an attempt by Netflix.
Or people become better at bouncing around with their subscription dollars. One of benefits of moving to streaming is the ease to stop and start the subscription.
This argues that it's Netflix vs Disney and it's a zero-sum game. If you lump all TV dollars together it's Disney vs Netflix vs CBS vs HBO vs Cable etc... It's not so clear what the consumer will do. The wild card is still live sports. It's the one area that cable still has a strangle hold. Once sports is fully streaming what can cable offer?
Some are, but a lot of regional games are blacked out and not available on Sling. I tried to switch the last couple of years and every weekend in the fall (College Football) my game was on cable and not on Sling.
Disney bought the rest of Hulu. They currently have full control and will have 100% ownership in a few years.
We're getting to the point where you don't spend 10 minutes flipping channels; you spend 10 minutes checking different streaming apps. And the monthly spend is approaching parity. I spend $75 on streaming services a month.
Yeah Netflix isn't going anywhere, Disney is just going to justify its chunk of your entertainment spending. I am okay with $50 spend for a large catalog of stuff to watch with no commercials, that enough of the improvement. Cable was and continues to be a scam which charges a lot of money and delivers very little value. So good riddance to that garbage.
Yes I pay $.99 / month for it. The normal plan with ads is 6.99 and 10.99 without ads.
Currently no other service has traditional ads
Honestly I don’t see how anyone is paying $75 / month for streaming services unless they are paying for sports plans, which most people don’t subscribe to. Most people subscribe to only 2-3 streaming services which probably includes amazon prime. That comes to roughly $35/month
Unless your account is a Spotify Premium for Family account (I just looked it up to confirm the word "Premium" was still in there). Which is a good deal, don't get me wrong. But then the Hulu thing doesn't apply.
A couple months ago there was an announcement about free basic Hulu with your Spotify Premium account. Unless you're a family, then fuck you.
We have a lot of subscriptions as well, although probably not $75 per month... however the cost is spread across four households (parents and siblings all share accounts). In cable days, including premium channels, that would have been $100 each instead of the current ~$20 each.
Why not loop through different streaming services through the year? Have only a single subscription at a time. The friction to sign up for a streaming service is minimal compared to getting a new cable connection. Of course, this would require that one be willing to wait to watch the latest episode of a show.
Yep, also most of us don't need access to everything simultaneously. I rotate subscriptions and typically only have one streaming service active at a time.
What you just described, minus YouTube is $40 a month. That’s really not that difficult for a lot of people, compared to how much cable use to cost, plus add ons. I already pay for Hulu, Netflix, and HBO, and I don’t mind paying another $7 for Disney+
Content isn’t free, and makers deserve to get paid.
Signing up for Hulu and Disney+ will give you all the content you’re looking for in the same price envelope sub $15k households are already willing to pay.
I don’t understand why so many people think this is a bad thing. Content distribution has become a commodity, thanks to AWS and the like. The codecs and whatnot are all standardized. And it turns out that consumers don’t really care about recommendation systems and similar accouterments. So the competition has shifted to the thing that people care about: content. When the market is competing over the thing people care about, that’s a good thing.
This is the healthiest the television industry has ever been. There are no “big 4 networks” controlling distribution. There’s no monopolies—if you want to launch a competitor, start a studio, pay Amazon a bunch of money, and boom. Disney, Netflix, CBS, etc., have just become umbrella organizations for studios producing content. They can compete directly with each other, and consumers and pick and choose what they want to spend their dollars on.
It’s annoying as a user to juggle subscriptions. If I want to watch something, I have to figure out where it’s available, sign up if I don’t currently have a subscription, worry about forgetting services and having a bunch of monthly payments I’m not using. End result: I watch a lot of YouTube and pretty much gave up on the rest.
Contrast with music, where I have a single subscription and get access to everything I want without having to think about it. The question of what I want to listen to is separate from the question of what service I want to use. I can pick a service based on price and features instead of juggling a bunch of different ones.
On the other hand, it's better than the alternative with cable providers where your only choices are the cheap, basic package with only 12 channels, or the really expensive package with >100 channels, of which you'll only ever watch a couple. Juggling multiple subscriptions is annoying, yes, but at least you can pick and choose what content you want to pay for.
Personally, Netflix has more than enough content for me to watch, so that's the only video subscription service I still pay for.
We're the same way, but we have Amazon as well, mostly because of the shipping side. There are series that I'd like to watch, but it's not available on either, so I just don't bother.
In fact, I started getting back into watching TV shows after a couple years of not watching much, and then the fragmentation with Netflix losing content and creating their own happened, and now I just don't watch nearly as much and we just watch occasionally for family movie/TV time. I have friends that mention various series and I've just stopped bothering looking anymore because, chances are, it's not on a network I already have access to.
My wife has gone back to watching movies at the theater, I'm playing more video games, and the only reason we pay for streaming anymore is for the kids. I used to enjoy talking about shows with friends, but now it feels like everyone has access to different content, so there's less common ground than before.
I'd be happy to pay a little extra for access to certain content, I just don't want to have to remember which service provides which content.
I wish there was an easier way to just buy content, in a way that I knew was going to support the creators and not line the pockets of the distribution network. I used to wait for stuff to come out on DVD and pick it up then, but I don't know how much the original studio gets for that, or whether the original studio even exists by that point.
I certainly don't like the subscription model, but that's a personal choice. I just don't watch a lot of episodic television content; at some point I grew tired of the drawn out plotlines and endless filler, and during the TV era, I became especially dissatisfied with the constant advertising. Even with ad-free streaming models, I find that I'm just not interested. So when that one show comes out that I do very much enjoy, it's hard to justify signing up for a streaming service; it feels like I'm paying for access to a lot of other crap that I'll never consume.
>I wish there was an easier way to just buy content, in a way that I knew was going to support the creators and not line the pockets of the distribution network.
I agree (Bandcamp for movies?) but the economics of this are hard. While you can make a solid album with free software, cheap instruments you own already, and a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, even a well made indie movie is going to run into hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in costs. They have to recoup those somehow, and it's a terrifying leap to go from a traditional production / distribution network to relying directly on consumers to pay for your product. It's "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" except in the movie distribution industry.
I suppose if there's one industry leading the way it's in video games. If I'm not mistaken several AAA games have been included in Humble Bundles, which means you pay what you want and get a non-DRM copy of the game. (Even a torrent link!)
> Contrast with music, where I have a single subscription and get access to everything I want without having to think about it.
Only because of the obsolete centralized planning model the law creates for music streaming, which long predates the capability for direct music distribution to the customer. It undermines competition, shifting power to the distribution system. But competing over whether your streaming service offers this or that feature doesn’t create competition on the part that really matters: content. It lowers the incentive to invest in quality music that breaks out of cookie cutter molds, it would be bad for consumers in every respect but on cost. (It is notable that whole television has never been better, mainstream music probably has never been worse.)
Imagine if software licensing had to all be cleared through a centralized board at rates set by judges. It would be what app developers hate about the App Store times ten.
The inconvenience of having to pick and choose is the cost of having a real market. We don’t order all our food through a central food clearing house. We order from different restaurants, who have different payment models, different menu formats, different delivery rules, etc. If all restaurants were legally required to be in Uber Eats that wouldn’t be better, it would be worse. It would give all the power and profits to the middle man, rather than the restaurants.
Disney copying Netflix makes it just harder for the customers. The whole Netflix subscription business model should die. When content distribution is commodity as you say, the only service they provide is easy payment.
Disney, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Spotify etc. divide content between them and if you want to watch four shows, listen a music and read an ebook, you may have to subscribe 7 or more content delivery system.
People should be able to pay for the individual series or even episodes. The only reason why you need to create account to consume content is to make payment easier.
And they let you subscribe to other services through their payment processing. And if you have a FireTV device, you can search for content across all those providers
One worst-case scenario can be found in what happened to CDs in the 90s and 00s. Content companies knew people would buy a CD just to get the one popular song, so they would fill the rest of it with junk.
You could look at any app’s library in a similar way, where there’s only a small set of “good stuff” while the rest is old junk. If they collude to spread the good stuff around all the apps, then you are artificially forced to subscribe to all of them if you want to see that stuff.
Yes, that is their prerogative as content owners, but nobody likes it and you feel like you’re getting robbed instead of feeling like you’re living in an amazing future that’s giving you good value. And it costs more so not good for consumers.
I dislike side rails, so I blocked it, and this appears to block the video that follows you around the article too. Here's the uBlock filter I use, which would probably work on other ad blockers:
I especially love how the video waits for you to start scrolling. I've noticed that as a vulnerability in autoplaying media, since the scroll counts as a user action and the browser will allow the site to "play" the media at that point. Some sites use it to "auto"-play videos with sound, working around the user's preferences. Don't any of these sites realize how hostile this behavior is?
> For example, about 20 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of the latest season of hit show Game of Thrones.
> It was one of the most-watched non-sporting events in TV history.
This is not even close to true.
Nearly 17 million people watched the Murder She Wrote finale in 1996. In the 1970s, each year, the highest rated episodes of All In The Family were consistently over 20 million. Seinfeld had 35 million once. 60 minutes has gone over 20 million many times.
Grace Under Fire, a mediocre sitcom most people here have never heard of, averaged about 20 million viewers for a full season in the mid 1990s.
I love when TV writers act like TV didn’t exist before The Sopranos.
Because the numbers are kind of crap lately. People don't realize just how the average episode of Friends beat 20 million for every one of 10 seasons [1]. The audience is fragmented like never before.
A small correction though, All in the Family was on average over 20 million households, and before every house had seven tvs that was significantly more viewers.
Netflix could loose half of their subscribers, take a massive hit, and still survive... guess that the press love the “X company is doomed!” approach...
Disney entering the streaming area is pretty big, but they still have solid roots in cinema areas. They can’t premiere the next Star Wars movie in streaming without cannibalising it’s ticket sales. Maybe they’ll obliterate other companies, maybe they’ll be successful alongside other players, or maybe it will be a bad move. We don’t know yet. It looks like an interesting offering right now, and probably will be successful, but I don’t get why they need to be so bombastic in their analysis...
There is also the option of Amazon buying Netflix or better yet Apple. So far I find Netflix content of higher quality than Disney. There is also a growing segment of the population that watches only YouTube. I find that is the main competition for Netflix.
> Disney’s ownership of iconic franchises like Star Wars gives it something no money can buy.
Lol, considering Disney themselves not only bought the iconic franchise star wars, but they also bought marvel and even Pixar. If Disney is good at anything, it's identifying under-capitalized brands, buying them and then milking them for all they worth.
Where did Disney get all this delivery cred? They do seem to be taking their time and they've been gobbling things up and certainly have the content. Aren't they just an old media company though? I remember when Disney Channel was a pay channel with relatively bunk content; like it had some original stuff and then like ancient re-runs for the Mickey Mouse club and once fairly rarely they'd play a classic Disney movie. Tons of commercials too and they had like special "early access" adverts for the big next movie and toys and things like that.
Maybe it's a different company now but I'll ask, with all their content: the disney stuff, star wars, marvel, fox, etc.. If they put it all on Disney+ at $7 a month, are they not leaving money on the table? I can't imagine there won't be up-selling or limited availability of certain media properties or something. The author is right, if it's all there at $7 and the app is great and they are bold and aggressive, then I would think Prime and Netflix, etc. will be in a bit of trouble. On the other hand, if Disney acts like they always have then I expect there to be like 10% good stuff, an advertising machine for whatever movie is next in the pipe and then just some bunk filler content.
True. The idea that Disney would allow this is doubtful to me:
> Disney puts a blockbuster like Avengers Endgame on its platform the same day it opens in theaters.
Limiting distribution, sure... Though again they would be losing a lot of money to DVD/Bluray sales, etc. so again I doubt it:
> After a few weeks it’s no longer in theaters. You can’t buy it. You can’t rent it. The only way to watch is to subscribe to Disney’s steaming service, Disney+.
Disney has a following and Neflix has a following so that says to me that customers will pick one or the other or both there is room for both. The idea that one has to beat the other is good for completion but does not mean that one has to go out of business. I see it as a big plus since now they both have to compete for customers. Yeah for us.
If Disney is offering a service for a cheap 6.99 why do people stop using netflix?
Disney has content for kids and superhero fans. This is not a netflix replacement but replacing whatever was in place before.
Stock prices are popularity contests and Netflix may take a hit but Disney is undercutting the high prices on Disney/Marvel content it charges now and longterm it might be better if they merged with a studio offering more adult material.
"Netflix changed how we watch TV, but it didn’t really change what we watch…"
It changed what I watched. Netflix doesn't even offer most network shows in my country so I stopped watching a lot of those shows.
>Netflix changed how we watch TV, but it didn’t really change what we watch…
Yeah, so? Who said we need/want/will change what we watch?
>The problem is that no matter how much Netflix spends, it has no chance to catch up with its biggest rival…
Disney? Who the fuck cares for Disney? 8 year olds or parents buying a subscription for them?
>Disney owns Marvel, Pixar Animations, Star Wars, ESPN, National Geographic, Modern Family, and The Simpsons. Not to mention all the classic characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
So, mostly irrelevant stuff. ESPN has been going down for a decade or so, Mickey wont be making any revivals, and most people don't get Netflix to watch Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, or National Geographic.
> Mickey wont be making any revivals, and most people don't get Netflix to watch Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, or National Geographic.
These articles act like I want to watch the same movies 100 times, so of course I'll drop a service with a dedication to creating new content. It makes no sense, but it does sound a lot like marketing hype by an affiliate.
Where do Disney's TV channels fit into this? Besides the obvious Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior, they also own the FX channels and Freeform.
Their movies currently eventually make it to those, and that is mostly where I've watched them. Sure, they take some time to get there. They are currently just up to 2016, with Moana, Finding Dory, Rogue One, and Doctor Strange being where they are up to in Disney animation, Pixar animation, Star Wars, and Marvel, respectively. But none of their franchises are ones that I need to keep current with anymore [1], so I don't mind.
[1] I did subscribe to Netflix for a month a few months ago specifically to get up to date on Marvel, so I could see Endgame in theaters. That was a special case because I decided it would be too hard to avoid major spoilers in the two or three years it would take to show up on cable.
The author says that $6.99 a month is a no-brainer for his 12 year old daughter, but what about adults? NetFlix has R-rated content that I doubt Disney would produce or carry, and there will always be a market for that.
Disney values their family friendly image too much. Which is why they'll only ever produce safe boring stuff that doesn't take any risks. So you get these kid-friendly superhero and Star Wars movies, which are popular right now, but surely at some point an adult audience would want more? Especially when they're watching it in the privacy of their own room. Looking at Netflix originals (even if they're not very good), I can't see Disney making something like Narcos, 13 reasons why, Devilman, Love Death & Robots, hell even something like Sabrina (Satanic imagery) or She-Ra (gay stuff). Seriously, what shows in [1] excluding "Children and family" section can you see being streamed on Disney+?
I should have known better than to click on a click-bait article like this.
Even if Disney+ enters the market and immediately dominates, that doesn't mean Netflix is dead. They'll have to (continue to) adjust and maybe their stock won't be competing with Amazon, but that's far from dead.
Netflix managed to turn a dvd-rental-by-mail service into the first majorly successful streaming service, and they are using that to pivot into creating competitive original content.
Netflix may survive, it may not, but this article was trash.
"After a few weeks it’s no longer in theaters. You can’t buy it. You can’t rent it. The only way to watch is to subscribe to Disney’s steaming service, Disney+. "
WRONG.
Any movie or TV show is on bittorrent for free. It's simply not the case that the only way to watch it in that situation is thru subscribing to a streaming service.
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