“Disney wants to own a bigger piece of the streaming pie,” Michelle Castillo reports for CNBC. “The company announced during its latest earnings report on Tuesday it intends to remove its movies from Netflix.”
“Disney plans to launch a branded direct-to-consumer streaming service in 2019 starting in the U.S. and expanding globally,” Castillo reports. “CEO Bob Iger told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin [that] Disney had a ‘good relationship’ with Netflix, but decided to exercise an option to move its content off the platform. Movies to be removed include Disney as well as Pixar’s titles, according to Iger. Netflix said Disney movies will be available through the end of 2018 on its platform. Marvel TV shows will remain.”
“The new platform will be the home for all Disney movies going forward, starting with the 2019 theatrical slate,” Castillo reports. “The company will also launch its own ESPN video streaming service in early 2018. The platform, which will feature about 10,000 sporting events each year, will have content from the MLB, NHL, MLS, collegiate sports and tennis’ Grand Slam events. To power the services, Disney is buying a majority ownership of BAM Tech for $1.58 billion. Disney bought a 33 percent stake in the company, which was spun off from digital media company MLB Advanced Media, in August 2016.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bad news for Netflix. Good news for something forthcoming from Apple?
Netflix, which lost $2.97 (-1.64%) during regular trading today is down another $5.07 (-2.84%) to $173.29 in after hours trading on the news.
I don’t think its good news for anyone, its yet another money sucking service that one has to shell out for to watch Disney’s popular titles.. pretty soon, ala-carte won’t be any cheaper than cable or dish. $6 here, $10 there,.. pretty soon and several streaming services later, your talking real money…
My sentiments exactly.
Yep. Been saying that for years.
Me too. Ala carte is no panacea if you’re hoping for cheaper solutions. Especially as content fragments into many services, all with hungry mouths to feed.
OTOH, what took them so long?
Totally. Over the years my DTV bill has just gone up-up-up.
I’m hoping Apple puts out a new Gen5 unit soon, because the bills are out of control with music/video/tv/internet.
I finally broke down and now pay for VPN service so I can torrent without tracking. I prefer to support content providers because I know TV and movies are expensive to produce. But I already pay for cable, Netflix and Amazon Prime and $13 per ticket to go to the movies. The line must be drawn here.
“As we approached the end of our relationship with Disney and looked at our future, we sort of saw a fork in the road. Where we were headed for a Lucasfilm type distribution agreement on one side or, as Bob Iger and I started to talk more, potentially joining — throwing in with Disney, joining Disney.
The more we thought about it, the more we thought about becoming part of Disney and being able to make our films without being two independent companies with two independent shareholder bases, with two independent agendas. But really everybody focused just on the films, and the stories, and the characters. And then being able to leverage those assets through Disney’s incredible array of unique distribution channels and other creative assets like the theme parks. After a lot of soul-searching and thinking and, of course, getting to know Bob, we came to the conclusion that this looked to be the most exciting path to Pixar’s future.”
Excerpt From: Owens, J.T. “Steve Jobs Bio: The Unauthorized Autobiography.”
I wonder if he would have made the same decision today. Next couple years might give us an answer.
Disney’s streaming, DOA
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The toddler and grade school demographic is *extremely* pervasive thanks to Disney branding and marketing, they’ve been able to get parents to keep buying Disney videos and other merch for decades, not to mention getting entire families to their theme parks (and they making them pay on top of admission to skip the hours-long lines).
$15/mo for on-demand access to their entire library would be peanuts by comparison.
It’s sad the consumer needs to suffer through this money-grabbing churn from all content providers. I think they should all have their own service since not everyone has Netflix or hbo or cable. However, those same content providers need to provide their content to Netflix et.al. so people that do subscribe to services like Netflix can get they content from a single service. I don’t see many people adding Disney to there ever-growing list of subscribed services.
Don’t forget CBS Access (or whatever the heck they’re calling it) to suck in Star Trek fans…
As the technology for setting up a library of assets for streaming becomes commonplace, it is natural progression for a company with the content assets that Disney owns to cut out the middleman. Netflix, after all, is just a distributor for Disney. As long as people keep having kids, Disney has an infinite resupply of new viewers/customers. It’s a no brainer for them, but definitely a disappointment for us grownups that may want to watch a Disney movie two or three times a year.
All the kiddies are going to be crying.
This is big media’s “I told you so”. You wanted a-la-cart? Here you go. Now give each of us $7/mo or $15/mo.
What they don’t know is we won’t sign up for their crap. If they want our money, they will have to go through NetFlix.
I have too much to watch as it is.
I cut the cord several years ago and have been watching OTA and Netflix. Sure there are other shows that I’d like to watch but I’m not willing to pay for it, it’s just TV.
Now if I could get NFL Sunday Ticket by itself like I once could then I’d pay for that!
This is why streaming is bullshit. With the greed of all these companies you’re going to have to have numerous subscriptions all over the place and it won’t be worth it. What a freaking joke
The company makes billions, actors and so on make millions, the top execs make millions and it’s never enough.
These are the same idiots who can’t understand how to stop torrenting of the media they keep milking us over and over again to watch
This will just increase the usage of streaming boxes and other forms of streaming and downloading or at the very least keep the levels up like they are now. I know lots of people that like to go see movies and what not at the theater, as I do too but we all only go for the big ones now. The costs to an average income person has just gotten way to high and now in this day and age of DLC and subscriptions everywhere id say percentage cost from a person’s income to watch TV, a few movies here and there and maybe play a few games is crazy.
But if I was running Disney I wouldn’t like the idea of basically handing over buckets of cash to netflix either. It’s just cable TV 2.0 in a sense.
Bad move on Disney’s part. Big as it is, they just don’t have enough of a catalog to pull in enough viewers to pay for the service.
Disney has become a minor player in the battle for the streaming living room…their strength is their equity in children’s movies which virtually everyone who has kids already has DVD’s of…the prize is original programming, the biggest threat to broadcast and cable television.
I want you to have my Disney baby. xoxoxoxo
But we thought you only let your kids watch Fox News and Breitbart, and old re-runs of Hitler rallies.
Unlike yourself, my children are all adults.
…whatever you say to me bounces off me and sticks to you !
Na na na na na;
na na na na na
TV? What’s that? I’m done with the current and past 8 years of complete crap they call TV. Haven’t watched regular or cable or streaming TV in close to a year.
I don’t miss it.
Got plenty of other things to do, learn and enjoy. Being a couch potato is not one of them.
When the FCC established rules for broadcasting, this is not what they had in mind. It seems there is a growing disease of disparity between good programming and the poor. If you want FTA television, you will end up with old material and mostly crappy infomercials. If you want current content, you will have to pay for it. This will continue to spread, unless regulation takes control. I know you don’t like regulatikn, but without oversite, a free market isn’t free, it’s chaos for the poor and tuned for the rich.
When revenue is flat you cannibalize your partners.
Saw Iger on Bloomberg Technology and you will only be able to get supplemental content for a fee. ESPN is still going to be thethered to a bundle from a Cable, Satellite or Streaming Service.
Disney wants you to subsidize all of it’s Channels. Since I do not have kids at the house unless I am babysitting, I have no desire or need to subsidize Disndy’s crap.
Content is king…Apple needs to buy them as flagship content for upcoming 4k Apple TV. I hope this was a planned move by Apple & Disney so Apple doesnt look like the bad guy who took them out of netflix. Come on Tim! Spend some of them billions!
Disney has the catalog to totally pull this off. Remember, they have other names that they operate under. For example Touchstone Pictures is Disney. Disney uses other name if the movie is too edgy for the Disney brand or if it is going to be rated R. This is really bad for Netflix. Disney will be a formidable competitor. As to whether the end result will be a savings to the average consumer? No, there will not be a savings in the long run. We will be paying as much as we have always been paying. The difference is we will paying $100 a month for the media we really want instead of $100 a month for stuff we never watch. Yes, It’s the same amount of money. But, you will be really able to vote with your dollars more than ever before. That difference will be important. The cable companies should be scared. Or, be aggressive in offering their internet offerings.
Serious question –
Do you genuinely pay $100 per month for a TV streaming service in the USA? It seems rather a lot to me.
I have to imagine he’s suggesting the total cost of multiple streaming services.
Am I the only one that can see that this is just cable tv streaming through a different pipe? Are consumers really this dumb? Cord cutting, my a$$. It’ jus a different cord you’ve latched onto.
I read on the paper yesterday that NetFlix have over $2 billion in debt 🙁
Here you go, also my last post was meant to be $20 billion, not $2 🙁
i can see why Disney would want its own service, even though it hurts the consumer
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4746708/Netflix-20-BILLION-debt.html
Let it go, let it go.
Turn away and slam the door.
I don’t care.
People legitimately complain about paying ever increasing prices for bundles of channels 90% of which they don’t watch, but the problem is that once everything starts splitting off there simply aren’t enough people who can afford to pay the amounts they’re charging for one source of very specific content. There is a value in having some channels be effectively subsidised so that there is a source of new stuff coming through, of things being tried that then go on to get mainstream popularity. Back in the pre-digital days of 50 odd channels I was more than happy to pay for the extra sport, movies that you’d otherwise wait years for, and channels showing stuff you couldn’t see elsewhere, but now there are hundreds of channels showing so much stuff that even with the best algorithm it’s hard to stumble across new things, or find something you can just veg out in front of. All that’s before you even get to the streaming services. I now subscribe to Netflix for a month, watch all the new original stuff I’m interested in then cancel it for 3-4 months at a time. It’s just not worth paying for all these services month after month.
OK, fine Disney. Just do it right!
Stupid NBC had decent free episode streaming for awhile. Then they botched their code so all you can stream are their ads. Déjà vu early Internet code bungling. You’d think after all these decades these companies could get web coding right. But Nooooo! 😛