
Disney Announces $12.99 Bundle for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ - sshuttari
http://geekdommovies.com/disney-announces-12-99-bundle-for-disney-hulu-and-espn/
======
Flow
I feel this fragmentation of where content can be found is going to cause a
new wave of torrenting movies/series.

I pay for 5 different streaming services right now, one is Apple Music. On
Apple Music I can find, what I feel, like 90% of all music I want to listen
to. On the other video streaming services it's a complete mess. They often
show pictures of a movie/series on their front page, and later when I decide
to watch it, it's gone. And gone from all of the services I pay for.

This behavior is taking away the convenience and make me feel they are gaming
me. I seldom go to iTunes and just buy some several decades old
movie/series(you can't even buy series on iTunes in my country) when they do
this, I either give up or torrent it(via VPN). Yeah, illegal I know.

I'm not really wanting laws to change, but this behavior from the content
owners in combination with their lobbying to make new laws to scan for content
they own everywhere, lobbying for removing Internet anonymity, and having
regular people pay damages that are more than they will earn in several
lifetimes is not very constructive for the society either.

I starting to think it's time for laws that, for example, force content owners
to make their content available to 80% of the paying streaming watchers, or
lose the right to the content.

~~~
eteos
For some reason alot of people talk like they have the right to have one 10$
subscription that provides every movie and series in the world, with the
reasoning that it's possible with music. That is a utopia. All the
movies/series are more expensive than all the songs. Especially production-
wise.

It wouldbbe bice

~~~
Karunamon
If the studios had the will to get together and do this, it absolutely would
be possible.

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javagram
$10 for everything that was already produced in history? Sure.

$10 to fund equivalent production of new movies and TV shows? Impossible.
Profits in the media industry aren’t that high, so reducing the amount of
incoming monthly money to less than a single movie ticket or 1/6 of a cable
subscription means that they can’t afford to produce nearly as much content as
they do right now.

~~~
wolco
If they started paying everyone minimum wage and cut production costs they
could.

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javagram
Good luck forcing everyone to work for minimum wage. They’d leave for other
industries, we don’t have a command economy.

~~~
wolco
Acting is a calling. We would lose many pretty faces but the people remaining
would be extremely talented perhaps more average looking.

There are a lot of people in community theater now who would love a bigger
audience. Tons of youtube creators would gladly make shows for the masses if
the networks would have them many would even pay.

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blhack
I’m more bearish on Netflix’s long term sustainability lately.

How many big show cancellations have recently resulted in massive blowback
from huge swaths of fans? As much as those might seem like petty complaining
from overly enthusiastic watchers, I think that Netflix should be more
cautious.

It’s caused me to get MUCH more skeptical about ever starting watching a show
on their service, because I’ve see lots of times where the story never gets to
see a conclusion. Netflix used to be a “no way I’m canceling this ever” thing
for me. It’s not even close to that anymore. My intuition is that lots of
people are the same. That should be concerning for Netflix investors.

They also just recently spent $200M to hire the two people behind the
catastrophic final season of Game Of Thrones. Game of thrones fans are
numerous, and lots of them HATE that duo right now. That’s another huge group
of people now actively looking for a reason to cancel.

It feels like for a long time Netflix didn’t really have to care about
customer experience or PR. They could do universally hated things like force
auto playing previews on their interfaces, and basically nobody would leave
because they had nowhere to go.

Now: users are forced to use an interface which seems to actively make them
upset while using it, to navigate through a bunch of options which might never
actually have conclusions. That doesn’t sound like a good long term customer
retention strategy.

And then here comes Disney, with their MASSIVE catalog of shows with
conclusions, for cheap. It’s not just Hulu vs Netflix anymore.

Netflix: fix the interface and stop canceling shows without at least giving
them conclusions. This stuff matters a lot!

~~~
uxcolumbo
RE: fix the interface and stop canceling shows without at least giving them
conclusions.

In your view, how can they improve the interface - other than improving the
recommendation algorithm. I find myself browsing their catalog for 20 minutes
or so and then end up not watching anything.

And totally agree with you on not cancelling shows. For example one of their
better, more creative and daring shows was the OA. Cancelled. One of Netflix's
USP could be that they are a place where people go to watch non lowest common
denominator shows. But of course this takes time to get up the viewership
numbers up and doesn't help them in the short term, hence why they have to
cancel shows I guess.

~~~
zwaps
Whenever you want to watch or continue a show, the link and continue watching
is hidden far down the page.

When you want to discover a new show, Netflix shows you mostly shows you
already watched and voted on.

During all this, you are constantly at danger of misclicks or misscrolls,
whixh start some loud trailer or an unwanted show.

Essentially, netflix ui designers are extremely incompetent. Either that, or
they truly do want to enrage their customers.

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totalperspectiv
And we are one step closer to being back to cabel and likely a swing back
toward pirating shows instead of working out what combo of 12.99 subscriptions
are needed to watch some subset of shows and movies.

I would honestly just like blockbuster back.

~~~
jaredklewis
I found the selection of digitally rentable movies on iTunes and Amazon (not
the streaming services, the pay per rental one’s) to be pretty good. If you
are willing to pay to rent (ie the blockbuster model), I think either has a
much larger and better selection than blockbusters ever had.

~~~
adrianN
Blockbuster used to cost a Euro per day. 1.50 for new releases. Renting
something from Amazon costs 3.99, about as much as buying a used DVD. I don't
think that's a fair price.

~~~
adventured
Or often worse than $3.99 on new releases.

Alita: Battle Angel is $5.99 to rent in HD right now on Amazon.

Redbox is charging $2.12 for all Blu-ray releases on disc, including Alita.
Their streaming version is also $5.99 in HD.

Hard to imagine running those kiosks 24/7, maintaining them and stocking them
is cheaper than serving up a stream version. They're no doubt charging $5.99
because they're confident that they can command it based on convenience
(laziness factor). $3-$3.50 for a new release in HD is around the edge of
reasonable in my opinion; and $1 to $2 for everything else.

~~~
lallysingh
Don't the kiosks charge late fees? Isn't that where the money was in the
rental business?

~~~
adventured
I'd have to assume they make a nice kicker from it. They add an identical
rental fee each day. So if you roll it over past the return time, they re-rent
it to you basically.

I know someone that owned a rental chain (the old style physical stores) in
the 1980s and early 1990s. At any given time 15-20% of their sales came from
late fees. Also interesting is that VHS tapes once cost $70-$100 ($40-$60
wholesale; $55 in 1984 is $140 today), so there was a serious investment and
risk in renting them out to customers at the time. Stores typically purchased
the tapes outright from the studios back then (so you can imagine the VHS tape
inventory costs); more recently many independent stores switched to a shared
revenue model, where they didn't have to front cash for inventory.

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tempsy
That does seem like a much better deal than Netflix.

Side note: would love to see an extensive study on the subscription economy -
stats on what the average household spends by category.

~~~
ricree
Worryingly so. To my mind, the price looks intended to kill off other
independent services, especially netflix. I can't see these deals lasting at
all, but even three or four years could be enough to cripple Netflix so long
as they are generous with their back catalogue and new releases.

~~~
anaphor
Won't they just jack up the price each year like Netflix has been doing, in
order to recover their original investment?

~~~
Pfhreak
This seems factually wrong. I haven't checked the data, but Netflix has been
streaming for like a decade, and while they've increased the price from time
to time it's hardly been annually.

I think what I've paid has gone from $8 to $13 in 10 years?

~~~
Dylan16807
Okay, so every other year.

Inflation would have gone from $8 to $9.50. And they've lost a lot of content.

~~~
skinnymuch
They’ve also added a lot of content. Netflix of 2010 or 2011 didn’t have a ton
of streaming available.

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mattl
I wonder how much for ad-free (Hulu already offers it) if that’s even a thing.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It appears Hulu with ads is the only option for the bundle.

~~~
patrickfatrick
Womp :(

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nobrains
We will enter an era where you make a bundle subscription to all these
services (Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, etc.) And then your monthly
payment gets distributed by the streaming services based on the ratio of
watching content from each one of them. This is technically doable now, so
seems like the best subscriber/subscription-provider option possible.

~~~
discordance
That would be so good. Also one of the few places I could see blockchain
actually being useful.

~~~
xmprt
I don't know much about blockchain. Care to explain how this of all usecases
is where blockchain shines?

~~~
discordance
Shared ledger between different providers so they can share who watched what
and distribute funds accordingly.

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tzs
I've seen claims that Disney movies (including Pixar and Marvel) are only
going to be on Disney+.

What I've not seen is if that means that they will no longer show up on the
Disney-owned cable channels like Disney XD and FXX, or it just means that they
won't show up on non-Disney streaming services.

I don't have kids, so it is not imperative that I stay current with Pixar and
Disney animation, so I've just been waiting until they show up on cable. They
are currently up to their 2016 releases (same for their Marvel and Star Wars
movies).

~~~
dmix
Why would they cannibalize their TV network for some online play by
significantly making their Disney channels worse? I can’t see any strategy in
doing that...especially after they spent so much time resisting the idea (aka
economics) of internet streaming.

~~~
gravypod
There could be much higher margins in the digital distributed content. Could
also drive user signups if they run ads for "watch this movie you want to see
for free for the first month".

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yumraj
It seems NBA is not there in ESPN+, which is a bummer.

Wonder if they will unbundle Disney+ or if this will be the only offering.

~~~
docbrown
It also looks to be no mention of streaming Premier League games.

Does anyone know if NBC owns those rights to stream stateside? IIRC, NBC
Sports is the Premier League hub while Fox Sports tends to host more
Bundesliga (German football club) matches.

~~~
iends
NBC owns the Premier League rights and they split the games across NBCSN
(primary channel), Premier League Gold extra (3 games a weekend, this dumb
online service that's just a cash grab), MSNBC (1? game week), and another
channel I can't remember (1 game week?).

TNT has some of the champions league games, and the rest are on Bleacher
Report Live -- some new paid online service.

FS1/FS2 has Bundesliga and some MLS games.

ESPN has Serie A, some MLS games. They also seem to have FA Cup, the
Championship, and the Carabao Cup on ESPN+.

This is pretty terrible compared to a few years ago. You could see all PL
matches via NBCSN or their extra NBCSN extra channels. Some big games would be
on NBC proper. Fox/FS1/FS2 had the champions league. Now things are more
splintered and you have to pay extra to see everything. In addition to getting
the channels, to watch the Champions League + Premier League you have to buy
TWO online only services that are both $9.99/mo or $65 and $80 a year.

For this season, the cheapest way to get NBCSN seems to be to use Sling Blue
for $25/mo. FuboTV used to be really good, but it looks like they've basically
been raising prices each year. Of course, SlingBlue doesn't come with
ESPN/ESPN+ but it certainly covers most the PL games and part of the CL games.

~~~
snaky
> $65 and $80 a year

In a country with median _hourly_ wage $18.58

~~~
iends
I don’t understand your point? I need to have a bunch of extra commercial
relationships with companies that I previously didn’t for the same services I
previously had. Just to watch maybe 5 more games that I care about.

------
chrisseaton
Their current Disney-only streaming service is $6 a month, for reference. So
you're paying an extra $7 for Hulu and ESPN

~~~
fcarraldo
Disney+ is different than the current service, and has not launched yet:
[https://www.tomsguide.com/us/disney-streaming-faq-price-
rele...](https://www.tomsguide.com/us/disney-streaming-faq-price-release-
date,news-27711.html)

~~~
chrisseaton
I think it just adds Marvel live action to the current service. Apart from
that seems the same content to me?

Everyone's talking about Disney+ like it's some mythical streaming service yet
to be revealed that you can't already get as Disney Life.

If you want to know what Disney+ will be like, presumably look at Disney Life.

~~~
kjcharles
It adds Marvel, Star Wars, and Fox content.

~~~
asaph
Notably it includes 30 seasons of the Simpsons.

~~~
workaway
Notably it includes 8 notable seasons of the Simpsons.

~~~
krustyburger
Now we’re pretending season nine wasn’t good? That’s surely taking things too
far because even season ten is quite solid imo

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cryptozeus
I for one welcome this...more choices are better and it’s about time we get
starwars on subscription

~~~
DangitBobby
It's not really more options if they took their offerings off of a service you
already had (Netflix) so they can make you pay for it on a service you don't
have yet. More options would be if they left it on both platforms so you could
pick your fave.

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tomohawk
Is there a bundle without espn? Bundling the sports channels on cable was one
of the main factors driving costs. Also, not really interested in espn's
politicization of sports.

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EnderWT
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20631123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20631123)

------
nabla9
$156 per year.

If Disney (DIS) keeps paying average dividend 1.25%, you can make them pay for
the subscription if you buy DIS stock for $12,500. (more if you want to
account for taxes, costs and their future price increases).

I bought DIS few months ago when I realized how big the Disney+ launch will
be. The price seems to be good without too much expectations.

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dang
From 3 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20631123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20631123)

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dfeojm-zlib
I'd like Xfinity unlimited 1 Gbps ISP/unlimited landline/260 channels + Hulu +
HBO + Netflix + Amazon Prime + Youtube Red + Spotify for one order of
magnitude more. That I could get behind.

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chenster
Is the Golf Tour Channel the same as the Golf Channel??

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chovy
Will they also offer Fox Sports channels?

~~~
sshuttari
I would assume No, It's interesting since Disney bought 20th Centuy FOX. But
did it also buy FOX News and FOX Sports as well?

~~~
jumelles
No. Fox News, Sports, and Television are what's left of Fox Corporation. The
sports situation is especially complicated, with international rights coming
into play.

~~~
sairahul82
Also because Disney owns ESPN they can't own Fox Sports for anti competitive
reason. They also let go Regional Sports Networks

