That and the ability to be forgotten about for a month or two for something else.
They are just now realizing the its extreamly difficult to actually make a profit with a streaming service. Most major ones like hbo max and disney+ lose billions a year. Netflix and hulu are the only ones that have been able to squeeze out a tiny profit.
The problem isn’t so much that it is hard to be profitable. It is that the Movie industry will just keep raising prices of the content until they are barely scraping by. Since there is 9 major streaming services they are effectively a commodity bidding over the media content. So the free market has squeezed the profit out of it.
Of course the streaming services then turn around and try to restore a profit margin by raising the prices. Now the consumers are facing raised prices for a small slice of available media and realizing that this is both expensive and inconvenient.
Even if the consumers keep using the streaming services at a higher price the media companies will notice that they are making a profit again and jack the prices further. The streaming services are basically helpless middlemen.
This is of course why just about ever streaming service is starting to produce first-party content. This is where the money is as they are in control of the price and don’t have to outbid other streaming services.
Do we have concrete evidence that this is true? I find it highly unlikely Disney+ was hemorrhaging money considering all the parents that are indefinitely subbed to D+ for the Disney catalogue.
Unless the original programming like all the Marvel TV shows (which are pretty low quality scripts) and the remakes (which are low quality) really cost that much to make.
They should report the losses at earning calls and i think they did. But i am to lazy to look it up.
Direct to consumer media lost $659M in Q1 this year https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2023/05/q2-fy23-earnings.pdf
I put on my robe and wizard pirate hat
Do you know how I watch movies? I got a single board computer running Linux that’s hooked to my TV. There, I open brave or Firefox with ad blockers and I search “Watch movies online” in a foreign language. Then I get to see any movie I want. Oh yeah, and I keep a VPN running at the router level, although it’s not really needed.
seems to be a disease going around. they have forgotten the agreements across the board.
remember its our network, they would not even be here if it was not for decades of our own investment to build the roads for them
the netflix thing was the most idiotic, obnoxious bullshit i’ve ever seen – really acting like using a website somewhere else was something THEY got to gatekeep and charge for. it’s not like they had to mail DVDs somewhere else, like it was a physical cost.
If they provide a service(an easy-to use, legal platform) in a capitalist system they didn’t create, I can’t get mad at that. What’s fucking stupid are their assumptions about inelasticity of demand. People have free choices, and if you make the paid choice sufficiently onerous, you’ll lose customers. Natural consequences.