Disney Plus is in BIG Trouble (And They're Not Alone)

Captain Midnight [Applause] this video is brought to you by brilliant so the end of 2022 and the start of 2023 has been a very rough time for Disney plus one of the world's largest streaming services sheddy millions of users and starting a troubling trend for what had been a pretty steady upwards climb the immediate knee-jerk reaction to this is probably pretty predictable is it Marvel fatigue people upset over Star Wars well the more you look into it the more complicated this answer becomes and most importantly it shows some of the growing problems facing these large streaming services going forward not just Disney plus so that's what I want to discuss this week and sorry if my audio is a little weird I am recording from the road but I really just wanted to get into it so one thing that needs to be mentioned right near the start here is that the biggest reason for this sudden drop in Disney plus subscribers had nothing to do with superheroes or lightsabers but Sports late last year Disney plus lost the rights to the Indian Premier League the biggest cricket league in India and something that had been a massive driver of growth for them now I've never actually watched Cricket I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on it or the nation of India for that matter but it's clear that losing this hugely popular league did lead to an outsized drop in subscribers in the country and in Southeast Asia in general so when looking at that staggering drop in subscribers it does really have to be acknowledged but that also doesn't mean that everything would be going fantastic if it weren't for Cricket and here's where we get to a lot of issues with streaming that aren't just unique to Disney plus one of the looming issues is pretty simple these big streamers are no longer the exciting upstarts that they want seem to be in the early 2010s and maybe even until a few years ago streaming felt like a pretty unbeatable deal it was often ad free and much cheaper than cable and the libraries were pretty impressive too with all sorts of studios and Distributors filling Netflix's catalog and at least in the US multiple TV networks and cable channels putting their shows up on Hulu back then it really felt like it was possible that anything could wind up on those services today that model has changed completely the early 2010s dream of almost everything the average person would want to watch being in one place is long dead and there's probably no better example of that than Disney plus itself instead of being a big broad service that has something for everyone it really specializes in a few of Disney's Big Brands especially when it comes to producing Originals which heavily rely on Marvel and Star Wars and even many of their Productions outside of those rely on old Disney IP from High School Musical to The Proud Family Revival now this is a little less the case outside of the US where Hulu barely exists and tons of like FX shows are accessible through the service a bunch of movies but it's pretty safe to say that the big brands are its bread and butter and they're hardly alone in that look at a service like Paramount plus which has really doubled down on Star Trek and Yellowstone maybe more than any of the others those two seem laser focused on a few of their biggest properties it's an understandable strategy as big brand names like this can cut through the constant noise and actually get some attention something it's increasingly difficult for new shows to do but it also comes with a pretty big downside like sorry to State the obvious here but the MCU and Star Wars are known as film franchises first and foremost and any shows that they make in those universes at least have to try to reach some kind of movie level visuals modern Star Trek also seems dead set on looking a lot more like the JJ Abrams movies than the old shows and what all of that adds up to is fairly short but very expensive television the days of Star Trek the Next Generation or Enterprise running for over 20 weeks a year is very far behind us instead a show like Star Trek strange new worlds will run for 10 episodes and some some Star Wars shows like the Mandalorian season 3 is only managing eight and after those very short windows many subscribers are more than happy to save some money and cancel the service until next season all of that builds into a problem that haunts almost all of these services from Disney plus to Netflix to Peacock and basically everyone else subscriber churn where 10 years ago many would be happy to just keep their Netflix subscriptions year round the sheer amount of big streaming services has encouraged more of a revolving door approach as subscribers sign up watch the thing they wanted and then cancel and maybe subscribe to a different service for a while instead with a sheer amount of services and the prices on those Services constantly going up these past few years of course many people are gonna opt for doing just that but for Disney plus and the others that means that the subscriber number the thing that's always measured their success just doesn't mean quite as much as it used to it Ebbs and flows and of course almost all of these big surfaces have lost money usually a lot of it with Disney plus reporting well over a billion dollars in losses last year now that was always part of the plan lose money for a while to make a lot of it in the long term and they do seem better positioned to do that than say NBC Universal's peacock which is still struggling to gain subscribers but it does seem like the days of these companies being okay with stomaching massive losses is quickly coming to an end with many of them including Disney plus having to resort to mass layoffs basically with streaming services on this scale there's one massive problem that they can't get around in the words of a Consulting service quoted by The Hollywood Reporter gone are the revenues enjoyed during the cable TV era which formally approached those of the global energy sector by some estimates streaming generates one-sixth as much revenue per home as pay TV in addition audiences are fragment commented canceling subscriptions is easy content has only become more expensive to acquire and produce I think that more than anything is what lies at the heart of Disney Plus's problems as easy as it would be to narrow things down to the MCU phase 4 being a disappointment or the Boba Fett show being terrible or whatever the issue with the service is just so much bigger than any of that it's that the Netflix model the model that services like Disney plus grew out of just isn't a profitable one especially when so many are attempting it to quote that article one more time rather than being the new slice bread investors and Executives have accepted that streaming is in fact not a good business at least not compared to what came before a common complaint I hear is that these large streaming services are becoming more and more like cable and there's a pretty good reason for that cable television actually made money if you want to read the whole thing I'll leave a link to that article Down Below in the description but where does that leave the future of Disney plus well obviously I can really only guess but I do think we have some indications since its Inception in the US at least advertising has been the financial backbone of TV ad tiers are already popping up everywhere with even Disney plus and Netflix starting to add them something that would have been Unthinkable just a few years ago I know many people won't be thrilled to hear this but I really do think that the future of streaming looks a lot like the past of cable TV but maybe with a lot more modern convenience just look at the rise of services like Pluto TV and Amazon's Freeview these are known as free ad supported streaming television or fast Services these function a lot like older TV even to the point of having linear channels that play on them live with ad breaks in addition to having a lot of shows and movies on demand they're far cheaper to run than the Disney pluses of the world with many of them like Pluto TV not even creating Originals where services like Disney plus and Netflix count on flashy and expensive new shows to Garner eyeballs and attention most of these fast Services have been far more conservative with spending relying on linear channels that play Old favorites like Fraser CSI and Doctor Who the classic shows and familiar cable-like setup are attractive to older viewers while the fact that it's free attracts a lot of cash strapped young people I'm not saying that fast services are some streaming Silver Bullet and I'm pretty sure that many will prefer paying for a streaming service over them but I do think we're gonna see things like Fox's 2B continue to grow and do better than say NBC Universal's peacock and I wouldn't be surprised if freebie becomes a more and more important part of Amazon streaming business while spending on Prime shows goes down as for Disney they don't have a fast service to call their own at least not yet but with their massive libraries of ABC ESPN and of course Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar I wouldn't be surprised to see them dip their toe into this kind of service soon whatever happens I'd be pretty shocked if the Disney streaming service of 2026 looks all that much like Disney plus does now because what these big streaming services are doing now just isn't working losing billions of dollars was acceptable when streaming television was the exciting far-off future but now it's the mundane present I think the Free Ride is kind of over to become profitable these Services may have to embrace looking a lot more like cable in 2007 and a lot less like present day Netflix but how that will work out is anybody's guess so I may have some issues with TV on the internet but learning online has never been better thanks to things like calculus in a nutshell on brilliant 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Channel: captainmidnight

Views: 792,542

Keywords: Disney Plus, Subscribers, captain Midnight, captainmidnight, Disney+, streaming, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, The Mandalorian, Season 3, Boba Fett, Andor, Netflix, Hulu, Tubi, Pluto TV, 2023

Id: 4N88pOhyKyE

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023