
There is nothing but bad Disney for the house that Walt built.
Any fantasy the executives had about being open by Easter is dashed. The Park Cast-Members have been furloughed (read laid off) And the executives have given themselves pay cuts. And they are now better than $13 billion in debt.
Disney is hurt. This was a company that required crowds to operate and crowds are now illegal.
So their only hope for income is now ABC, cable channels, Hulu and Disney Plus.
Well, at least Hulu is doing okay. But at this point they can’t even give Disney Plus away. They were counting on an initial loss as they built viewership but the problem is that they aren’t building a subscriber base. The Disney Vault isn’t worth it to Disney fans because most of them already own most of the AAA titles in hard format.
As for the original content, well, the truth is there just isn’t enough of it to justify keeping the service for more than a month. Yeah, the Mandalorian was good but it’s not worth maintaining a subscription for a year while waiting for the next season. The rest of OC are all shorts, documentaries and reality shows.
And the new content is now out of production until MAYBE June, which means the stuff that was supposed to be available in the fall won’t be online until 2021.
Honestly I’d dump it myself but I’m not paying for it.
Bottom line: This is yet another money loser for the already teetering Disney. The board didn’t fire Bob Iger anywhere near soon enough. AND now he’s back
Does Disney+ have the full Disney catalog or is it still limited?
Another area that is DOA right now is ESPN. How many people will decide that going without sports is just fine?
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Not the full vault, they are trying to rotate stuff in and out but there really isn’t enough of it.
We’ll know that they are really desperate when they stream Song of the South.
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The chicken-or-the-egg problem in streaming seems to have a lot in common with my beloved video game industry. People won’t subscribe to your service if there isn’t good stuff to watch on it, and content providers won’t put stuff on your streaming service if there aren’t a lot of people subscribed to it.
The difference with streaming is that soon every content provider will have their own service, which is doomed to fail. It would be like if Capcom, Konami, EA, etc. each put out their own $300 gaming machines which played only their games and no others. The last time we had a similar situation in video games was the crash of ’82. I’m predicting something similar will happen to streaming soon.
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It started with Netflix’s aggragation.
Then came the diaspora.
Next will come aggragation.
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The aggregation with ads. Amazon hosts the IMDB channel which is movies and series for free with ads. The ads are coming.
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Thinking about it more, the current situation is EXACTLY like the video game industry pre-crash:
1) One company makes a market breakthrough in a new kind of product, makes money hand over fist.
(Atari =Netflix)
2) Competitors create rival products to get a piece of that pie, and start battling the big company for exclusive content.
(Mattel/Coleco=Hulu/Disney/etc.)
3) People working for the big company who make a lot of money for it decide they can do better on their own, and form their own company to compete with their former bosses.
(Activision = anyone licensing content to Netflix, but Disney is the closest comparison)
4) The big company, in a desperate and flailing attempt to hold on to its market, spends a lot of money rushing out a vast quantity of inferior products. It tries to disguise this with slick marketing.
(E.T./Pac-man, see our host’s “Netflix Death Watch” article. Streaming is here now.)
5) Consumers get irritated by the big company’s lousy products and the overabundance of competitor choices, and stop buying any of them. The big company and the entire market collapse in a huge flaming wreck, taking down small startups and huge corporate parents alike.
6) Many years later, one company rises from the ashes, revives the market, and completely takes it over by correcting the mistakes of the past.
(Nintendo most likely = Netflix)
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