Disney Proving Streaming Is A Loser
Broadcast television is dying. This is something we covered on a number of occasions.
The Holy Grail for the major studios is to get into streaming. This is something that was touted as being a huge money maker. However, this is something that is providing false.
Across the industry we see a ton of companies losing money. They all believe in the Netflix model but that had first mover advantage. Even now, it is struggling to maintain relevancy.
Disney had their earnings call it the numbers were mixed. What should be most concerning, on top of everything else is the fact they lost subscribers.
Losing Subscribers
Streaming relies upon subscribers. Getting people locked in to a monthly fee is paramount.
This is what all broadcasters are trying to achieve. The challenge for Disney is that its streaming service is not growing. In fact, it is contracting.
Subscriber losses continued, with the company reporting 146.1 million Disney+ users during the most recent quarter, a 7.4% decrease from the previous quarter.
This is a big drop in one quarter. It is a trend that started many quarters ago.
To make money, these platforms require a growing number of users to boost the revenues.
For Disney, this is going the wrong way. It is an other burden on top of their movie business which is struggling this year.
Web 3.0
My hypothesis is that Web 3.0 combined with technology is going to really upend this industry.
When discussing streaming, this is really just a distribution mechanism. We already saw this disruption with the introduction of the Internet. Obviously, Netflix came at the expense of Blockbuster. This did not impact broadcast television a great deal.
What was not interrupted too much was content creation. We still see the overwhelming percentage of the shows and films coming from a few corporations. This is also going to change.
Software is going to radically alter the abilities of people. Just like anyone with coding skills has the potential to create an application that generates 100 million downloads, we are going to see people do the same with video.
People are going to put together shows and films, much of it done by AI, that will garner 100 million viewers.
Technology Curve
A major problem for the likes of Disney is that we are in the early stages right now. We are going to see things improving over the next few years, to the point where people are going to be blown away by what is possible.
Early adoption is always a bit messy, regardless of the technology. However, over time, things get less expensive and easier to use. In short, the product improves.
Take any technology you use today and the early version of it. Notice how things changed over the years.
This is going to happen with script writing software and image conversion technology. While it doesn't provide much competition right now, this will not be the case in a couple years.
It is easy to overlook all this now. However, there is a chance that companies like Disney are surprised by what takes place.
In the meantime, Disney is losing subscribers for its streaming service each quarter. This is a trend it will have to reverse.
Posted Using LeoFinance Alpha
I totally understand why each studio thought they could make way more from platform subscription sales than just licensing their properties to Netflix... but I guess maybe the didn't expect as many competitors as they got.
Personally (selfishly) I hope they all go back to selling/licensing their property to one platform. People really don't want to keep jumping around platforms to watch their favourite shows or pay for multiple subscriptions.
Yeah that is the big thing: the money.
Having to pay for so many subscriptions can add up quickly.
People are also unhappy with Disney as a company of late. Their some horse shit, remaking of movies with a butchery of the original or plot lines. So many reasons and a lot of it stem from the hubris of Disney, thinking they are untouchable. They are starting to smell the roses, and they are shit smelling roses and are scared.
I hope that the AI revolution can reach escape velocity before the fossils in government try to crack it down. Disney and lots of others will feverishly try to prevent it from taking off.
Not sure how they could crack down on it if they even wanted to.
I agree with you about some of the AI. It will obliterate some industries/professions before people realize it.
Trying to attack it from the regulation standpoint, where people won’t be allowed to do anything on AWS or Azure or other big cloud platforms or CDN’s. It’s not easy but we all know the tech companies want monopoly control of it all.
The problem with that is there are other counterparts outside the US. How do they have with Alibaba and Tencent?
That is where things change a great deal. Plus there are more "clouds" being built, even if not like those two. Look at the Facebook and Twitter systems. Those are every bit of AI giants although internal.
Funny this should pop up as I cancelled my Disney plus account last night. We got it for the Marvel TV shows that started off good and dove further and further in quality until we would stop watching halfway through an episode, never mind a season. Secret Invasion is the most boring Marvel product I've ever seen.
I think that explains the decline in users to be honest. Disney/Marvel products are just low effort dog shit now.
Yeah they did really torch that brand. They messed that and Star Wars up big time.
An incident occurred in Turkey that resulted in the loss of extra members. Disney made a documentary about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkey. They were going to broadcast the documentary all over the world. Upon the initiative of the Armenian lobby in the USA, they abandoned this plan. This decision triggered a member cancellation campaign on social media in Turkey.
Was that in this quarter?
It is in the third quarter. Debate still continues.