Disney+ Streaming

Thu Nov 28 23:08:47 UTC 2019

Again, this has gone beyond off-topic for the NANOG list. Please take the
discussion elsewhere.

-Mike Bolitho

On Thu, Nov 28, 2019, 3:52 PM Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com> wrote:

> Back in the old days, we had the ultimate in unbundling: you walked up,
> got a ticket, and watched the movie.
>
> In principle it wouldn't be that hard these days to do something similar
> with a tremendous reduction in friction. Basically pay-per-view on
> steroids.
>
> My sense is that it would be tremendous failure though: how would a
> consumer know how to value different content? Going to a movie is
> comparatively a big commitment with plenty of time to decide if you think
> it's worth it. Channel surfing, not so much. So maybe we are doomed to some
> sort of bundling.
>
> The big problem is that I don't want to pay for a month of content to
> watch one or two shows. And I definitely don't want to pay a month's worth
> of content to three dozen providers of which i may only watch a few of
> their programs a couple of times a month. Now if you reduced that to, say,
> a day pass I might bite, especially if there was no more friction than the
> usual channel surfing.
>
> Mike
> On 11/28/19 2:23 PM, Robert Haylock wrote:
>
> I agree with Brian, this is not unbundling, it's just removing one layer
> of distribution; you no longer need the Cable company to play aggregator to
> the content distributors, you now buy from them direct (especially true in
> the case of HBO and Disney, except ESPN is not yet included). The next
> logical large player to enter the global** direct-to-streamer market would
> be NBCUniversal, so I'm sure we will soon be preparing for that one too :)
>
> Rob
>
> On Fri, 29 Nov 2019 at 06:47, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2019-11-28 at 10:50 -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> > While I agree about the likely outcome, I will point out that
>> > consumers have been
>> > begging for unbundling for years.
>>
>> This is not the "unbundling" that consumers have been begging for.
>> Rather I would submit that it's actually quite the opposite and much
>> more like the bundling that they have been railing against.
>>
>> The "unbundling" that consumers have been begging for is minimally, the
>> ability to buy a single channel for a fair price and not have to take
>> 14 other channels of *garbage* with it at 15x the cost one of those
>> channels.  I say minimally because I suspect that the really savvy
>> consumers would actually rather even pay (again, at a fair price) per
>> show or episode.
>>
>> But that's not what's happening with this fragmentation.  This
>> fragmentation is like the cable company splitting up that "once price
>> for all" bundle and putting the pieces into other bundles, each at the
>> same cost as that original "all in one" bundle that the consumers were
>> originally happy with and saw as fair value.  Of course now to continue
>> to getting those pieces of the original bundle that they were happy
>> with, consumers are having to buy multiples of these new bundles and
>> their costs are driving up sharply accordingly.
>>
>> > This fragmentation of streaming services _IS_ the direct result of
>> > that request.
>>
>> I would submit that that is completely untrue.  Do you really think
>> Disney pulled out of Netflix and started their own service because
>> consumers wanted Disney to unbundle from Netflix?  I would suggest that
>> that is completely not why.  Rather, Disney was not happy to have just
>> a piece of the Netflix pie, and decided, as greedy as they are, that
>> they would sell their own pies and take the fully monthly subscription
>> price.
>>
>> > It’s unbundled service, exactly what they have been asking for.
>>
>> Again.  No.  Not at all.  Not even close.  Quite the opposite in fact.
>>
>> The problem with suggesting that this is unbundling is that the cost of
>> Netflix didn't reduce when Disney pulled out and Disney (I would bet, I
>> haven't actually looked at it's cost) isn't charging the faction of the
>> Netflix cost that would be commensurate with their percentage of the
>> entire Netflix library.
>>
>> So there has been no "unbundling" of any sort.  Rather it's been an
>> exercise of actually creating a new bundling.  And I still predict that
>> once the reality of this sets in with consumers, they are going to
>> reject it and head back to that low (zero) cost means of obtaining
>> their media that they used when they were unhappy with the previous
>> generation of bundling.
>>
>> b.
>>
>>
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