Disney has announced that their upcoming stand-alone streaming service, called Disney+, will be available on November 12th. It will cost $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year. The annual option essentially gives you 2 months for free when you pay for 10 months upfront.
The app, seen above, will have 5 sections for Disney’s various properties: Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. The app is expected to come to Fire TV devices, but Disney has not explicitly said so yet.
The service will feature existing Disney owned content, as well as exclusive content found only through the new service. A series based on Avengers characters, Falcon and Winter Soldier, is one of several new originals to expect. Other Marvel characters getting new content include Loki and Hawkeye. Monsters, Inc. and Star Wars are other franchises that will get spinoff shows. Disney+ will also be the exclusive streaming service to watch The Simpsons, once it launches. Disney will likely offer a discounted bundle that includes Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu for one price.
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They should’ve stuck with the rumored $5 a month price to get into impulse buy territory but I’m sure alot of young adults/parents will be interested in this service.
The library is big but uninteresting compared to Hulu, WarnerMedia and others.
DISNEY has been leasing out their inventory to Netflix…so we will see how large their selection is. This is also why Netflix is spending big to create their own content.
If the internet is to be believed, Disney is the major stakeholder in Hulu with a 60% stake. A bundling option of Hulu (with live TV), Disney+ and ESPN+ would be of interest to me.
Believe the internet.
Hulu started out as a coop effort by ABC, FOX, NBCUniversal, and WB. CBS declined. The first three owned 30% each with WB owning the last 10%.
By buying Fox and their stake, Disney has majority control of Hulu and are rumored to be trying to buy out NBCUniversal and WB.
Disney’s plan is for Hulu to be the distributor of their adult content and D+ to be the distributor for the “family” content.
Most Fox content will go to Hulu, including Deadpool and future R-rated Marvel movies and shows, while existing Star Wars and PG-13 Marvel movies and shows go to D+.
WarnerMedia is likewise segmenting their distribution between DCUniverse, HBO, and their upcoming streaming service.
Disney isn’t really looking to go after Netflix for the “something for everybody” market because Netflix and Prime are too entrenched. They’re going down the DCUniverse and CBS route of targeting specific audiences at a lower price point.
For heavens sake it’s not even launched yet and people are trying to bring it down by talking about price increases !
You can’t compare their price structuring to You Tube TV or similar, this is a much more targeted service
So please, let’s just sit back and see how it plays out.
What would be the fun in that? ;)
Besides, it’s Disney!!
Trashing them is an official internet sport.
Sometimes, it’s even for reason.
Since Disney is leaving Netflix, do you think that means that our Netflix subscriptions will go down in cost? Less licensed content should equate to less pass through costs to customers, right?
That would be showing weakness, something losers might do.
Netflix is investing in original content and is willing to go into debt to do so.
So it’s highly unlikely they will lower the price.
Within 6 months they will hike the price.
A lot of questions surrounding this, one company with so much influence over the rest of the entertainment industry.
What happens to all the other streaming services Disney content, will it be removed/reduced? (or be to prohibitively expensive to license)
What about the Disney streaming app (currently free with cable subscription) will their content be neutered as well?
I agree, this will be $8.99+ in one year (think YouTube TV!)
Everyone clamored for a la carte programming. Now we have it and no one is happy. Disney+, high speed internet, and an antenna is pretty good entertainment for <$60 a month. The bottom line is that any inexpensive alternative to cable begins with an antenna.
I think most people thought they would get the wholesale rate that cable companies pay, not every major company fragmenting into their own $6-10 a month VOD service.
Streaming services come with features no cable system offers: deep back catalog; anywhere, anytime viewing; exclusive content. With Disney, don’t underestimate the value of the offline downloads. That goes way beyond cable capabilities: a parent can load a tablet with dozens of kid movies or full seasons of shows, substituting for actual disk purchases. $69 buys, what, 4 DVDs?
It also saves bandwidth for folks on metered broadband or slower rural systems. There’s a lot of value in D+. Most of it targeted at actual family needs. It’s definitely not for everybody but those it helps, it helps bigtime.
Expect to see more services like this: it’s not unbundled cable. It’s something else, more sophisticated and more evolved.
A good thing.
That’s true, but cable comes with features streaming doesn’t offer like end-to end customer service, hardware support, and the delivery mechanism. Some have VOIP and security products and most include local channels — a lot of local channels — and public access programming. It’s really just a matter of figuring out what you want and where to get it then deciding if it is worth the price.
I’m pretty happy with OTA. I in the middle of a DirecTV/ATT promo and a Student Prime subscription, but will likely drop both when the discounts end. I only pay $50/month for high speed internet. BUT I own THOUSANDS of dollars worth of DVRs. And when things go wrong, I am up in the attic or swapping out hardware. Fortunately, I enjoy that kids of stuff.
For me, it’s all about The Longhorn Network. If you ain’t got cable, you ain’t got LHN. So cable wins every single time and there ain’t nothing you can say to change my mind. Hook ‘Em!
My understanding is if you’re in the area, it would be available via WatchESPN. Which means you can use Hulu Live, Vue, YouTube go, etc.
People expecting the wholesale rate were always bound to be disappointed. The wholesale price cable companies pay is spread across all customers of a particular package. If only one fourth of those customers would pay for Disney on its own than expect it to cost four times as much.
Exactly. I remember seeing that price list. Instead of getting the expected by-the-channel wholesale prices, fragmentation makes viewing much more difficult without achieving meaningful savings.
Only if you actually watch every single channel in the bundle. It’s not that cable doesn’t offer value, they do, as you pointed out. And some people find enough value in the bundles to stick with them. Great for them.
But not everybody finds enough value in the bundles to justify the cost. To many people the bulk of the channels in a bundle are just chaff, filler. Believe it or not, lots of people with cable never watch ESPN, or Golf, or lawn and garden shows.
A lot of people only get cable to get A&E or SyFy or History or Lifetime or Hallmark. Conversely, a lot of people never watch any of those.
That is where the need for unbundling comes from. Cutting those $50 “low end” cable bundles down to $15-25 streaming bundles.
And I understand that fans of fat cable bundles see cord cutters as a problem because Cablecos losing subscribers will make up the lost revenue by raising fees even more.
But that would be their problem, not ours.
The trends are all away from the Cableco business model and towards constant availability, on-demand streaming, shwich renders DVR tech obsolete. no need to record something locally that will be eternally available via streaming. Cord cutting will continue and grow. That is a certainty.
The genie ain’t goin’ back into the itty bitty living space.
Disney Plus is Disney acknowledging this and willing to let their cable channels (DisneyKids, Freeform, etc) fade in order to secure their place in the streaming video marketplace.
There are big gains for consumers in streaming. And good money for the content owners. The middlemen? Not so much.
The word of the day is: disintermediation.
New York corporate publishers already hate it.
The key thing to remember is that streaming services are all month-to-month.
Nobody forces you to stay subscribed.
Subscribing to four or five doesn’t mean you’re subscribed to them all at once. Or forever.
You can binge Netflix exclusives for two months, switch to Hulu, or DCUniverse, HBO, or yes, Disney plus for a month, all at will and all it takes is one click.
It’s called subscription churn.
Plus a lot of the newer services are ad-supported, like cable, but free. Still on-demand, though.
@Fjtorres Not so sure I agree with your logic (or lack thereof). Just because you find value in your cord cutting, doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in cable. Like you, we drank the Kool-Aid too. After years of being a cable subscriber, we left and hopped on the streaming train. Once the honeymoon was over, we realized that most of the available content on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video was the same kind of filler that was available on our cable subscription. Oh sure, you could pay to rent a movie or show on Amazon Prime Video, but we could have done that too with our cable subscription. And the “guide” that is used on all of the streaming services is horrible compared to the guide that cable offers. Also, cable has an On Demand feature, so you can watch any movie or TV show that is available at any time, which is a similar service to streaming. At the end of the day, we found that we were getting less bang for our buck with all of the streaming services and we really weren’t happy with the experience. When we went back to our cable provider, they gave us a $25 per month discount. Can your Netflix do that?