Disney says it has more streaming customers than Netflix (opens in new tab)

When hotstar was bundled with Hulu - hulu suddenly got huge infusion of Indian movies and shows. Nothing Netflix has even comes close.

I wonder also, if they are counting hotstar, which is pretty big in India.

Having said that - I personally find content on disney+ boring and stale. Some Marvel and Star War spin offs are okay, but most are meh. I don't know how to put it, but disney+ is trying too hard to en-cash popularity of existing franchise and I believe lacks depth.

Netflix while has uneven programming has/had shows which are pretty good and break new ground(IMO). Queen's Gambit, Dragon Prince, Arcana etc are pretty good. They have also wasted money on the whole witcher show and their "original" movies are by and large meh.

It is a very strange contrast to have such high quality and garbage next to each other.

Also the restart show works, but not a whole series… it will still sometimes get confused and jump ahead because you watched future shows.

the "half-assed" projects are the only thing that has me coming back. Netflix in contrast to a lot of the other services still has a decent amount in particular foreign and original IP. Most recent example, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, that would not be on Disney+. I just don't care about the 50th take on Star Wars. Given the numbers apparently I'm the only one on the planet but I just don't understand it.

Does it really? (Serious question.) We got Disney because of the Disney part but I was pleasantly surprised by how much other big name content is on there.

I'm hardly highbrow in my viewing habits and enjoy a good blockbuster movie or popular show as much as anyone. I do like to spend my limited viewing time on stuff that isn't complete junk though.

I've all but stopped even checking Netflix now because the odds of anything on there being Netflix-made junk that I won't even finish watching are so high. Meanwhile I'm probably working through a couple of different shows and have several movies waiting at any given time on Disney. I suspect our Netflix subscription will be ending soon as I don't think anyone else in the house is watching anything on there either right now.

I'm baffled at how much of a pain this is. Don't show him more stuff, he very clearly wants to watch what he's chosen; yes again, what do you want from me?

Very, very true. Disney's magic is their strength as a content brand. Not just their core products; with ESPN you know exactly what it's going to be, from live sports to documentaries.

Netflix made an amazing pivot from physical to digital distribution, and that will be studied in business schools forever.

But they failed to pivot from digital distribution to content. They knew they needed to, they spent billions of dollars trying to, but they didn't understand that content has to be the primary brand identity. Distribution is an implementation detail.

15 is nothing tho compared to all of their flops.

if anyone likes cartoons checkout: centaurworld - awesome wrap up on the last episode dogs in space Maya and the three dead end Cuphead over the moon Klaus

I hate this so much.

I understand the idea. “We want you to come to Netflix for all your needs”. Makes sense from their perspective.

But I’M the user. My Apple TV helps me keep track of everything I’m watching right now. New seasons of shows I watch pop-up so I know they are out. I don’t have to check 7 apps every few days to stay on top.

But Netflix won’t participate. You know what happened to me? I forgot about it! Instead of constantly reminding me it exists by seeing it in my Up Next section (like Hulu, HBO, Disney+, etc) it’s buried under a pile of other content I’m constantly reminded about.

Terrible user-hostile decisions. Just like hiding your queue of what you were watching last to promote The Floor Is Lava: Season 7: Back to School Adventures or whatever I wasn’t going to watch anyways.

Somehow, the video landscape has shaken out to have generalist (Netflix,maybe Amazon) and specialty content, not all that different from cable. So people are used to it that way. And come to think of it, radio generally plays music from all record companies, so there is a precedent there too.

With more fragmentation, particularly with Netflix losing it's generalist position and having more self-produced crap, I suspect that downloading movies is going to become viable for more people

Interestingly enough, the record labels - or at least Sony and Universal - actually do have minority ownership in Spotify. I would not be surprised if that was specifically pushed to get those labels on-board with Spotify's really low royalty rates.

As for why they don't do it today... my guess is that the exclusive content model just isn't as much of a draw for music as it is for movies and TV shows. Or, more specifically, we don't listen to music like we watch TV shows. Imagine if someone just made a list of episodes of Netflix shows they liked and watched them in a random order - that'd be insane. But that's how we handle music all the time. Pulling your music off Spotify means you lose out on radio and playlist royalties, because nobody can make playlists across streaming apps. You'd have to switch into the one streaming service that has the latest Taylor Swift album, then switch back to the one that has the Sony BMG catalog, and so on. Nobody would do this.

People these days usually don't listen to entire albums, but to individual songs as part of playlists. If all record labels created their own streaming services, it would break this experience and people would go back to piracy again to get it back.

Further, music is something that usually exist in the background while people do other things, whereas movies/shows requires attention to benefit from the content.

Service like Netflix or Disney+ can manage to create exclusivities because people watch episodes of a show in sequence due to the nature of the medium and are emotionaly engaged/invested in the story/characters, so they are essentially "captive" of that serialized content for its duration.

And that makes it harder to get convince someone to subscribe to your service because quality is not important for background noise. Even a unique song gets old after listening to it more than a few times on loop. That leaves quantity as your sole selling point, which if it is only your catalog is not much.

Maybe they could make an organized effort with other record companies to pull out of Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music all at the same time. But any of the smaller companies wouldn't be interested in that because it would make it harder for them to compete because they have a smaller catalog and less money to spend on the tech.

As a consumer I very much prefer the Spotify/Apple Music model. I don't want to have 20 subscriptions. I want to go into Blockbuster or some other video retailer and get any movie and pick what I want. I don't want to think about studios and distributors and rely on external services to even figure out what to use (in Germany: https://werstreamt.es which tells me where I can watch/download)

The content probably works better for film streamers too. If you have to change apps every time you finish a 3 minute song to listen to the next one you probably would look for a different solution, but film is a much longer commitment so switching services after watching is less of a hassle.

Compare the fact that people used to pay for (individual!) cable TV channels, but there was no equivalent for radio - a few people did pay for satellite radio, but I don't think you ever got people signing up for the premium package in the same way they did on TV.

So this is a total guess but as far as I know radio stations have always played all music. As far as I know there’s never been Sony stations and EMI stations and such. Maybe with original programming like soaps and game shows long ago or talk shows more recently but never music.

On the other hand TV sort of started siloed. Maybe because of radio consolidation? But CBS had CBS stuff, NBC had NBC, etc. Cable kind of continued that (outside of syndication and reruns).

I just can’t imagine listening to a BMG station. I don’t have any clue what label(s) my favorite artists are on.

1) There's so much more producer variety in music than in video, even at the top of the charts.

2) Music listening habits are very conducive to variety. In the time I watch a single Marvel movie, I could have listened to songs from 10+ different record labels.

There's no parallel in movies. But it would be interesting to see the actors of star wars in a play that tries to recreate the movie.

I really hope not. It’s possible the 2010s will be seen as a golden of the TV shows where there was so much competition for eyeballs that many shows were made which otherwise might not have been. Niche demographics seemed catered to which otherwise might not have.

Moving back to Disney owning everything and other channels not being able to compete… that’d be sad. Some people aren’t really excited about super hero shows or Star Wars anymore.

Since the bundle includes ESPN+ we have an upper bound on how big that "some" can possibly be: 24.3 million according to https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/disney-plus-subscribers-164...

The actual bundle numbers will be less than that of course, but without knowing how many people subscribe exclusively to ESPN+ (i.e. not as part of the bundle) we don't know by how much.

It's usually an expression, but you may, in fact, be the only one.

Prime is the UHF of streaming platforms carrying the WTBS catalog of content.

It's free, towards the end of the dial, and almost all re-runs with the occasional trophy showpiece.

Yes, the art style is similar. The animation quality isn't remotely close. The environments aren't remotely close. Clone Wars environments, especially the outdoor ones, are extremely bland and repetitive.

Disney can just buy out content from competing services and HN will cheer them on with how amazing they are when they prevented other services from streaming the same content.