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Disney To Pull Its Movies From Netflix and Start Its Own Streaming Service (theverge.com)
Disney announced today that it will end its distribution deal with Netflix and launch its own streaming service in 2019. "The move is a real blow to Netflix, which secured a valuable streaming deal with Disney back in 2012 -- before streaming had really taken off," reports The Verge. "The deal only kicked into effect last year, so Netflix is barely seeing any benefit here." From the report: Netflix won't lose its Disney movies right away. Disney says it plans to cut Netflix off starting with the studio's 2019 films, and Netflix says it'll be able to keep all the Disney movies it gets through the end of that year. That means Netflix should be able to stream the next two Star Wars movies, but it'll miss out on the new trilogy's final installment. "We continue to do business with the Walt Disney Company on many fronts, including our ongoing deal with Marvel TV," said a spokesperson for Netflix. Disney's streaming service will be built off technology from BAMTech, the MLB-founded video streaming platform. Disney was already a major investor in BAMTech, and today it's making an even bigger investment -- of $1.58 billion -- giving it a 75 percent stake in the company. The acquisition still requires regulatory approval. The Disney-branded streaming service will be the "exclusive home in the U.S. for subscription-video-on-demand viewing," and will kick off with films including Toy Story 4 and the sequel to Frozen. "Original movies, TV shows, [and] short-form content" will be added to the service, and it'll be filled out with older movies from Disney and Pixar's catalog and shows from Disney's TV channels. The report also notes Disney plans to launch a streaming service exclusively for ESPN, targeted for launch early next year. "Disney is promising about '10,000 live regional, national, and international games and events a year,' with individual sports packages available as well," reports The Verge.
When do the other movie studios pull their licensing and NetFlix only has original content? And is the Disney service going to be as good or better than the NetFlix experience?
Full Disclaimer: I'm glad Bambi's mom died.
This all resembles when the studios vertically "integrated" the movie houses... And were eventually forced to divest.
Let's see... What all does Comcast own/control.
No, we don't need network neutrality
I won't even notice they're gone. I refuse to watch their content even when it is present.
I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services. Billing, passwords, setting up and maintaining devices, etc is a real hassle.If it's not on either service, I am not going to watch it. Period.
I have Netflix, and I have Amazon Prime*
This is plenty, I can watch 99% of what I want, and if it's critically important (movie night with friends), we'll do a 24 hour streaming rental. Maybe when we have kids we'll dump netflix for disney, but until that day, we'll just stop watching disney movies. It's just not worth it as an adult with limited free time, a commute and other priorities.
*We do have HBO now, through Prime, but we're huge Game of Thrones nerds, and it bills/streams through the Amazon Prime app so it's pretty low hassle
moox. for a new generation.
I just was thinking yesterday: Know what I need? Another streaming service in my life!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Disney, more than any other content producer/distributor, has a massive catalog with a very well-defined market. They'll probably pull stuff like streaming movies that are in the "Disney Vault" (that's code for artificially scarce films that aren't as good as you remember anyway).
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
No way am I going to sign up for Disney's streaming service. There are too many streaming services already and I'm going to stick with the successful ones that have the broadest offerings.
If I were Disney, I would be pushing for a fair revenue sharing deal. Push Netflix to share out their revenue to the content providers according to the fraction of time watched, and push Netflix to provide transparency so this can be audited. Netflix, in turn, should charge a reasonable delivery/infrastructure fee, and share out the revenue for content "blind" to where the content comes from. I.e., if their own content generation produces 30% of the viewing, their own content generation division gets 30% of the content revenue.
--PeterM
I wonder if this has to do with the Vid Angel/Disney lawsuit and the recent workaround that allows Vid Angel to filter Disney movies on Netflix. By moving their movies off of Netflix, they effectively block Vid Angel again.
"The move is a real blow to Netflix, which secured a valuable streaming deal with Disney back in 2012 -- before streaming had really taken off,"
How is this a blow to Netflix. No shot in hell I'm paying for another streaming service just for Disney's dinky library. So this just means I will torrent the Disney movies and Netflix can free up some revenue for other movies or more original content.
Disney already tried this with licensing out their characters to other companies to produce video games. They decided to stop that practice entirely and use an in-house game studio instead. Their games went to shit. Then a couple years later, they started licensing out again.
I have a feeling that history will repeat itself with this news of licensing streaming content.
Soon there will be so many streaming services that if you want to be able to watch everything you're going to pay more money than the cable subscription you canceled.
What the heck is the point? We're back to square one: It's too damn expensive, might as well pirate the content.
Save the moral arguments; it doesn't matter. There's a point where the cost involved becomes prohibitive, and people still want to see the content. Make of that what you will.
Cut the Cable and go to streaming to save money...
More and more companies start their own steaming service and remove their shows from the existing services...
Now you'll have to subscribe to a half dozen or more streaming services to see the shows you might be interested in...
Cable prices aren't looking as crazy anymore...
Netflix. HBO. Amazon. Hulu. And now, Disney.
You know, the reason people started cutting cords was due to the fucking cost being forced upon us. $100 split across half a dozen streaming services is just as financially painful as a $100 cable bill. I hope Disney finds a loss with this bullshit move.
Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2? Way to "innovate" with yet another channel full of fucking sequels. Gee, can't wait for Star Wars, Episode 27. How original.
I am no Netflix fan (in fact just cancelled after the latest price hikes and screw you's they gave to customers in Australia), BUT fucking Disney is just showing yet again their heads are wedged firmly up their arses and trying to continue the traditional distribution models and locking viewers out of anything but a very narrow option. I don't care what movies they have or that my family wants I will pirate them before I support such douchebaggery.
Seeing that I live in Australia, I am sure this service will be denied to me, in any case, as I am sure Foxtel will have exclusive rights and will try to continue to enforce their ludicrous 1990's approach of making people sign up for Rugby, Cricket and some other shit sport I don't care about in order to watch one TV show at about $79 a month. Currently, if you want Game of Thrones and Silicon Valley, legally, in Australia, you're compelled to buy multiple different "packs" from these clowns and the price really is $79 a month. Or you can buy Private Internet Access for about $15 a year and torrent.... Why do you think Australia leads the world in piracy?
I swear, everybody wants a piece of the streaming pie, but, AGAIN, they have NO CLUE what consumers want (or they just don't care - in which case, fuck them all). They had a much better chance bundling under Amazon Prime, Netflix, or Hulu, and that way consumers still had a better option than premium cable.
I will NOT pay for a streaming service for every channel or studio that broadcasts 1-2 things I watch. That being said, goodbye Disney. You can join the ranks of all the other morons in media I've disowned (HBO, Showtime, CBS, etc).
Cheers.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
I have a sub to Netflix and I have a sub to Amazon Prime.
That's all I'm investing in.
DC wants their own streaming network for additional money. Fuck them.
Disney wants their own streaming network for additional money. Fuck them.
I don't get cable TV because I already pay $150/month for my internet service and I don't really watch anything on TV.
For the few things I have an interest in, I'm not going to pay additional amounts of money for multiple networks that essentially add up to a cable TV bill.
If I can't get the shit I want on Netflix or Amazon, I simply won't watch. Plain and simple.
COULD I afford it? Sure. Will I allow myself to be repeatedly "held up" for yet ANOTHER subscription service?
HELL THE FUCK NO.
And I, frankly, don't see what's wrong with continuing to license older content to another streaming network, and hold your own new content strictly to your network (outside of purchases) for 4-6 months. This way you continue bringing in licensing bucks and can still present on your own network for essentially no cost.
But no! It's not like Disney is sitting on a NINETY YEAR CACHE OF CONTENT or anything.
It's not like Warner Brothers has NINETY FIVE YEARS OF CONTENT.
With all of the studios that have come, gone, merged, etc, there are literally tens (if not hundreds) of millions of hours of content out of the major studios in the past century. Even if only one percent of which was considered "worthwhile", that's still hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of hours of excellence in programming. That's more than anyone could watch in a given lifetime. And that's before taking into account the pleasures of repeat viewing.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Disney will take itself off Google and launch a competing search engine. They'll call it something cool like Infoseek or Go.com. I'm sure it's going to be very successful.
Netflix has realised that basically the rest of the world is pretty profitable once you know how to cut down on fraud and keep your library as consistent as possible...
sure as a producer you can get distribution deals with large media companies (e.g. British sky or Australian foxtel ) but do you want one big bang ?
or lots of micro payments and some big ones mixed in.... ?
Disney's approach is american centric and a train wreck of licensing sport from the start... good luck with that I'm sure those BAMTech people will be enjoying themselves on someone else's coin...
Disney in an uproar as piracy soars. Demands Congress increases copyright protection to life of the universe + 100 years.
What - wait - I thought you couldn't afford the rising cable/satellite rates! Now you can't afford a la carte?
If you think these various streaming offerings mean that you're not going to pay a hell of a lot more for them than cable, you're a sucker.
People were open and honest with what they really wanted with the success of Netflix: they wanted everything in one nice place for a reasonable price. For a number of years that's what we got. It wasn't customers who killed this model, it was the content companies.
In fact, forget the streaming service.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This is really about shoring up the revenue streams. ESPN has had layoffs and major drops in revenue, and it's only going to get worse over the next several years. The whole model is changing, and C-suite types are going to get desperate.
Make love, not reality television.