The Disney Thread | Happy 90th to Donald Duck!

[kayumanggi]

 

[Ryan Reynolds]

Disney really wants people to bundle

 

[TwoMisfits]

5 minutes ago, Ryan Reynolds said:

Disney really wants people to bundle

 

 

Good luck on the large price hikes when you can't make new material.

 

From today's earnings call...

 

Disney Q3 Earnings - At the end of Q3, there were 146.1 million D+ subscribers, down more than 11 million from the last quarter. Disney+ non-India subscribers grew from 104.9 million to 105.7 million.

Disney+Hotstar in India went from 52.9 million to 40.4 million subscribers. Hulu grew from 48.2 million to 48.3 million.

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by TwoMisfits

[JWR]

Boy, he changed his tune REAL quick, didn't he? 😆

 

[Porthos]

1 hour ago, Ryan Reynolds said:

Disney really wants people to bundle

 

 

1 hour ago, TwoMisfits said:

 

Good luck on the large price hikes when you can't make new material.

 

 

Price is probably still too cheap to turn a (reliable) profit even at $14 a month (double the intro rate back in 2019, BTW).  Might be approaching the actual price inflection point though.

 

===

 

When it comes right down to it, the future for the masses is ad-supported tiers. It really is just about the only way new (read expensive) content for streaming makes financial sense, IMO.   Any system that is decoupled from popularity = revenue is fighting a losing battle, again IMO.  Even Netflix isn't that profitable.  Or rather, it really ought to be much more than it is.

 

If you can't make money on carriage fees* and/or retransmission agreements/syndication, and if the physical media market is crippled or at best has evolved into a boutique market, then just about the only real source of revenue will be upfront fees and ads.  As @TwoMisfits implied there is a point where folks will stop buying upfront, especially with the dual strikes.  At the same time revenue gotta come from somewhere.

 

And if corps insist on Walled Gardens (and it does appear that cracks are forming there), well what else is left?

 

I've been saying for years that consumers have been making out like bandits on streaming.  Well looks like the piper is gonna start asking to be paid.

 

* NB:  Even HBO, which is ad free, still got revenue from carriage agreements.  One of the biggest mistakes streamers made was following an HBO model of expensive Prestige TV content but then getting rid of soo many sources of revenue that the current situation was practically begging to happen.

[excel1]

1 comments doesn't offset multiple decades of largely treating the creative community extremely well. Iger is no bigger hypocrite than any other executive and I personally think this is an opportunity for someone such as him or Zaslav to build some serious goodwill and positive PR by leading the end. 

[The GOAT]

2 hours ago, TwoMisfits said:

Disney Q3 Earnings - At the end of Q3, there were 146.1 million D+ subscribers,

down more than 11 million from the last quarter.

Disney+ non-India subscribers grew from 104.9 million to 105.7 million.

Disney+Hotstar in India went from 52.9 million to 40.4 million subscribers. Hulu grew from 48.2 million to 48.3 million.

Yikes. The only profitable streaming service seems to be Netflix and that's because they practically have a monopoly on the market, thus have the luxury to put out garbage and underpay everyone and everything. Streaming is a false god. 

[Speedorito]

I think people are skipping over the fact that they lost 12.5M subscribers from Hotstar in India due to losing crickets rights there. And didn’t generate much money…

Edited August 9, 2023 by Speedorito

[XXR & Friends]

6 minutes ago, The GOAT said:

Streaming is a false god. 

Not really. The entire loss was in India and that's mainly due to losing the cricket rights. 

[Jonwo]

The fact Disney grew in revenues in other areas suggests the company isn't going bankrupt any time soon.

[WorkingonaName]

Netflix won the streaming wars and it aint even close.  

[Darth Lehnsherr]

Disney+ discourse has somehow managed to combine my two main hobbies in the most odd way (cricket and movies/tv).

[Sckathian]

3 hours ago, The GOAT said:

Yikes. The only profitable streaming service seems to be Netflix and that's because they practically have a monopoly on the market, thus have the luxury to put out garbage and underpay everyone and everything. Streaming is a false god. 

I think you can argue for Amazon considering their streaming is part of a wider strategy. Unlike other companies they are fine loss making as long as people are using Prime generally and coming to their service where they sell other content.

 

D+ is such a ball fumble to me. I still think 90% of subs will be families for legacy content but Disney is pumping out expensive poorly received Marvel and Star Wars content for like 10% of that audience and basically nothing else.

[The GOAT]

3 hours ago, Speedorito said:

I think people are skipping over the fact that they lost 12.5M subscribers from Hotstar in India due to losing crickets rights there. And didn’t generate much money…

How so? 

[The GOAT]

 

[Deathlife]

2 hours ago, Jonwo said:

The fact Disney grew in revenues in other areas suggests the company isn't going bankrupt any time soon.

Exactly. That plus the fact they said they are comfortably liquid.

 

I pointed it out in a comment in a different thread, a company as large and as diverse as Disney will need to experience a catastrophic drop in their core business to go bankrupt.

 

Not to mention the fact that people repeating 100 times that a movie lost money doesn't actually make it so. Especially when the company producing these movies have so many ancillary sources of revenue.

[Speedorito]

41 minutes ago, The GOAT said:

How so? 

Disney+ Hotstar has an ARPU of $0.59, while core Disney+ is $6.58

[SpiderByte]

13 hours ago, Speedorito said:

I think people are skipping over the fact that they lost 12.5M subscribers from Hotstar in India due to losing crickets rights there. And didn’t generate much money…

Yeah, this is just a continuation of the losses they already had from Hotstar. Disney's numbers always had an asterisk basically because Hotstar is just basically completely different but renamed to Disney+. Streaming is still clearly not where the industry as a whole wants it but this isn't related to like the strikes or anything 

[Willowra]

15 hours ago, Porthos said:

 

 

Price is probably still too cheap to turn a (reliable) profit even at $14 a month (double the intro rate back in 2019, BTW).  Might be approaching the actual price inflection point though.

 

===

 

When it comes right down to it, the future for the masses is ad-supported tiers. It really is just about the only way new (read expensive) content for streaming makes financial sense, IMO.   Any system that is decoupled from popularity = revenue is fighting a losing battle, again IMO.  Even Netflix isn't that profitable.  Or rather, it really ought to be much more than it is.

 

If you can't make money on carriage fees* and/or retransmission agreements/syndication, and if the physical media market is crippled or at best has evolved into a boutique market, then just about the only real source of revenue will be upfront fees and ads.  As @TwoMisfits implied there is a point where folks will stop buying upfront, especially with the dual strikes.  At the same time revenue gotta come from somewhere.

 

And if corps insist on Walled Gardens (and it does appear that cracks are forming there), well what else is left?

 

I've been saying for years that consumers have been making out like bandits on streaming.  Well looks like the piper is gonna start asking to be paid.

 

* NB:  Even HBO, which is ad free, still got revenue from carriage agreements.  One of the biggest mistakes streamers made was following an HBO model of expensive Prestige TV content but then getting rid of soo many sources of revenue that the current situation was practically begging to happen.

The D+ legacy bundle of $14.99, which includes D+ ad-free, Hulu, and ESPN+ with ads, will now be priced at $18.99, a $4 increase. I think they forgot to mention this.

 

[JWR]

9 minutes ago, SpiderByte said:

Yeah, this is just a continuation of the losses they already had from Hotstar. Disney's numbers always had an asterisk basically because Hotstar is just basically completely different but renamed to Disney+. Streaming is still clearly not where the industry as a whole wants it but this isn't related to like the strikes or anything 

 

We may see the effects in the Q3 call.