Disney is banking on a password crackdown and spate of sequels as it pushes to make its streaming business profitable.
The company, which is under pressure as audiences move away from traditional pay-TV and cinema, said it was on track to meet its goals after new subscribers and price rises helped to narrow losses in its streaming business.
The password crackdown will work, sadly. However is it going to be enough to make up for the fact that Disney’s got nothing right now except shitting out sequels?
I don’t know that it will work. How many additional people sign up when these password sharing crackdowns happen? I doubt it’s enough to make their number crunchers happy.
There is a lot of selection bias here on lemmy. The majority of us are technical enough to either know where to find free streaming sites or torrent.
The large majority of customers aren’t.
It’s why these crackdowns work. They’ve done the math. They know they’ll make more money then they’ll lose.
It’s also that they basically raised a generation of users who never had to pirate. Truth is 20 years ago there was literally no alternative to pirating. So you either figured it out or you’d have to drive to the store.
Nowadays, most consumers have gotten complacent, which is understandable given how good the legal alternatives were at one point.
However, while the initial steps might be a bit more difficult nowadays (I strongly advise against torrenting without a paid VPN), getting to a convenient setup is much easier nowadays. The *arrs, jellyfin, Kodi, docker, Android devices connected to a big screen etc. enable anyone willing to spend the time to create a setup that can rival commercial offerings.
Just to emphasize, I don’t condone piracy here, but the direction the industry is going is unsurprisingly off-putting.
Even with the arrs, jellyfin, et al, it’s still not a turn-key solution. Fmovies and the like are more “user friendly” as they don’t require any special software outside of knowing the URL.
Unfortunately, sharing those urls are often against website rules and you sort of have to learn them as you explore piracy in general.
Even with the arrs, jellyfin, et al, it’s still not a turn-key solution.
Not quite, all I wanted to express is that spending the time, you can get an experience close to the commercial offerings. And I guess with docker based setups it’s rather easy. Never used it though.
Personally I’ve never been a fan of piracy streaming sites, they always seemed so sketchy.
How many additional people sign up when these password sharing crackdowns happen?
Which every company saw, and that’s why they’re all gonna do this too.
I know I’m just an anecdote but Netflix had some ridiculous deal where I paid $75 for a year of Starz and I got Netflix for free. So they got to pretend like they didn’t lose me when in reality I was imminently going to quit due to the password crackdown.
So much of modern business is just hoodwinking investors into thinking infinite growth is possible.
I dare them to cut me off. Every dollar not spent on streaming will go to selfhosting and piracy.
You should spend that dollar on self-hosting and piracy anyways, it’s a better value.
It’s such a daunting thing. I used to Plex everything, but it became too much. There were ISP letters too. Does someone have a dummy’s guide?
- Don’t torrent without a paid VPN
- Done
People shit on Disney for only doing sequels, yet when they release original properties like they have the last 2 years, people ignore them and don’t watch them. No wonder they go to sequels, viewers clearly don’t want to gamble on new stuff. And all the people bitching about Disney only doing sequels, don’t watch Disney movies anyways
What original properties? Not a rhetorical question, I’m curious
I assume they mean “Wish”, also known as “how many Disney references do I need to make for them to count as a movie”
I wouldn’t have minded the references if the movie was good. It wasn’t and the songs were subpar.
In the past ten years, I thought Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, and Encanto were good. Raya, Strange World, and Wish were not for me… and those were three of the last four Disney animated original movies.
For Pixar, they’ve been hit or miss for me too. I liked Inside Out, Coco, Soul, Luca, and Elemental. Didn’t care for The Good Dinosaur, Onward, Turning Red, or Lightyear.
But sequels can be hit or miss too.
One of the best animated movies I’ve seen in recent years (apart from Spider-Man) is The Mitchells vs. the Machines. It’s completely hyper, but original and funny.
The ones you didn’t like my kids loved, so maybe you’re just not the target audience anymore?
There is plenty of things Ioved as a kid that I can look at objectively look at now and say if it was good or not. I’m not sure if a kids enjoyment says much about quality; I used to think Gex was better than Mario.
I think kids enjoyment of a kids movie says quite a bit. Disney adults are weird.
Where did I speak on Disney? Just had nothing original to say?
