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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.
I don't have time or budget to deal with more than two paid streaming services.
Really, all this fragmentation will kill the business. Without one stop shopping and reasonable prices, it's better to just go back to bittorrent.
Really, all this fragmentation will kill the business. Without one stop shopping and reasonable prices, it's better to just go back to bittorrent.
I've probably posted this before, but in any case - I fully expect the next several years to be really, really annoying for those of us trying to "do the right thing" and pay for content. Every entity which owns even a tiny piece of some popular show or movie is going to attempt to launch their own streaming service.
Eventually most of them will shut down after losing lots of money, and things will consolidate back to just a few aggregators - but until then it's going to be stupidly annoying.
In the meantime I'm not going to pay for a streaming service just for one show - not Star Trek, not Stargate, not Star Search. There's already more streaming content available than I could reasonably see in my lifetime.
#DeleteChrome
This is Hulu 2.0.
Every couple years the distributors try to setup their own streaming company. And every few years said new streaming company goes under because the rights holders make stupid decisions and the streaming doesn't work. Expect it to fail just like all the things before it.