Disney+ Adds Almost 8 Million New Subscribers (theverge.com) 47
Disney added 7.9 million new subscribers to its Disney Plus streaming service during the first three months of 2022, the company announced (PDF) in its Q2 earnings report on Wednesday. The Verge reports: That brings the total to around 87.6 million worldwide, excluding the 50.1 million people subscribed to Disney Plus Hotstar internationally. In the US and Canada alone, Disney Plus now has 7.1 million more subscribers than it did a year ago, with 44.4 million. The company also said that the number of subscribers for all of its streaming offerings -- including Hulu and ESPN Plus -- had grown to over 205 million, an increase from the 196.4 million it reported in January.
Disney also reports that it's earning more per Disney Plus subscriber than it had been previously, at least in the US. Where its average monthly revenue per paid subscriber used to be $6.01, it's now sitting at $6.32. Disney says this is thanks to "an increase in retail pricing and a lower mix of wholesale subscribers." Despite this, Disney Plus is actually losing the company money at a greater clip than it was before. Disney says this is thanks to higher costs for production, advertising, and technology. Those costs seem unlikely to go down, and raising prices, like Netflix did, could cut off its subscriber growth. All that put together makes it obvious why Disney is looking at creating an ad-supported tier sooner rather than later.
Disney also reports that it's earning more per Disney Plus subscriber than it had been previously, at least in the US. Where its average monthly revenue per paid subscriber used to be $6.01, it's now sitting at $6.32. Disney says this is thanks to "an increase in retail pricing and a lower mix of wholesale subscribers." Despite this, Disney Plus is actually losing the company money at a greater clip than it was before. Disney says this is thanks to higher costs for production, advertising, and technology. Those costs seem unlikely to go down, and raising prices, like Netflix did, could cut off its subscriber growth. All that put together makes it obvious why Disney is looking at creating an ad-supported tier sooner rather than later.
Crazy eh (Score:2)
Piratebay FTW!
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And the introduction of ads also means more tracking and wider distribution of that tracking data.
I remember the first movie ads... (Score:3, Interesting)
Disney is looking at creating an ad-supported tier sooner rather than later.
I still remember the first time I went to a theatre and they played an ad before a movie. The whole theatre booed.
I am one of those new subscribers, and one of Netflix's recent losses. I had been spending more time surfing Netflix's listings than actually watching shows. That and the fact that their recent top-tier offering, Bridgerton season 2, turned out to be nothing more than a trashy Pride and Prejudice done while trying to rewrite the "history" part of historical fiction. So I dropped my subscript
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The market has spoken.
Re:Crazy eh (Score:5, Insightful)
People just love that warm fuzzy feeling they get from the DRM telling them what they can and can't do with their own computing machine.
Streaming services are one of the few instances where DRM actually makes sense, because you're paying for access to watch the content while you hold a valid subscription, not for the rights to leech the entire library to your home NAS.
The main problem with DRM is when it's applied to things that you ostensibly do own, such as video games, Blu-Ray discs, and smartphones.
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DRM doesn't stop people pirating material from streaming services. Just check The Pirate Bay, it's full of "WebRip" releases that are direct streams from services like Disney+.
What DRM does do is waste vast amounts of electricity. It also limits the devices that the streaming service works on, because they need a valid DRM licence. That licence isn't free so the consumer ends up paying for it.
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So? Go ahead and subscribe and rip the stuff yourself.
You'll find it's extraordinarily difficult - stream ripping isn't easy at all, and the tools are proprietary to the scene groups who are not sharing it for several obvious reasons. (One of which you can guess, but the other is that it's a competition with other scene groups).
And th
For streaming DRM doesn't matter (Score:2)
People just love that warm fuzzy feeling they get from the DRM telling them what they can and can't do
People don't see any of that with streaming video services, they just click the video and it plats the thing.
That is all people want.
People don't even generally care about offline use anymore, since that case is more and more rare.
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Literally nothing about Disney+ tells you what you can and can't do with your machine. It tells you only what you can and can't do with their subscription rental service.
If you want to buy something then buy something. Don't bitch about not owning something that you never bought in the first place.
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No it doesn't.
First quarter.
So these numbers were finalized BEFORE the whole "We love groomers and pervs" drive Disney went on.
About to cancel (Score:1)
Get woke (Score:1)
Make even more money??
Republicans: *checks notes* That's not in the script.
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We used to say "you snooze, you lose."
The vocal minority of whiners complaining on social media about Disney's wokeness aren't representative of their wider customer base. As I've mentioned before, "get woke, go broke" really only applies when a company completely misunderstands their primary demographic, like when a sporting goods store that primarily caters to rugged, outdoorsy types, stops carrying firearms.
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Unless there is another example you're referencing the biggest example of that was Dicks Sporting Goods and even then in 2020 there was a dip right after the anouncement to around $16 in March 2020 but their stock was up to a high of $145 in September and even now is around $85 and they have increasing revenues for every quarter after Q1 2020.
Now is that Dicks being actually woke and caring about gun policy? I would say no, they saw an oppurtunity for good PR but I have to imagine they saw firearm sales as
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You can't say that from this.
Q1 ended weeks before Disney's perv push.
It'll hit Disney too (Score:4, Interesting)
Get woke...Make even more money??
Remember it took years to really drag Netflix down, the same will be true of Disney. But they are on that path.
Could be recent actions will make them re-think through, and at least for Star Wars they pulled back from that abyss.
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uh, did you see the dumpster fire that is boba fett?
Anything people didn't like about that show were note from Woke issues, they were stye choices some people didn't like.
While I thought the colorful speeder bike gang was a bit out of place, I really liked all the Tuscan stuff, and really enjoyed the Mandalorian episodes in the middle... I think it's just a lot different than what people were expecting.
The one thing that really didn't satisfy me was the ending, it seemed like it just fell a bit flat compare
Re: It'll hit Disney too (Score:2)
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Remember it took years to really drag Netflix down
Please tell me which competing streaming service is going to get the rights to all of Disney's IP and leave Disney+ with nothing worth watching? Because that's what happened to Netflix.
I'm sure some people are really thrilled to watch "Stranger Things: The College Years". I got fed up with Netflix when they lost the rights to the Stargate series.
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Netflix was around a lot longer than D+ has been too - if D+ gets an ad supported tier and puts the prices up, then it'll fail far faster than Netflix. I smell the end of an experiment coming on :-)
Honestly, to hear that Disney is losing money is really quite gratifying. They were the ones who had a hissy fit with Netflix because apparently Netflix was keeping too much of "their" money, and so they took their ball in and made their own service. It turns out running an entire streaming service isn't quite so
"In the long run we're all dead" - Keynes (Score:2)
Only half kidding. Disney is throwing their old clientele under the bus for an entirely new one - ageing childless fanbois. A Dixie Chicks move. Sometimes this works.
Sometimes the shark needs to be jumped. Fertility decline is slowly killing their traditional business model.
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Get woke...Make even more money??
Remember it took years to really drag Netflix down, the same will be true of Disney. But they are on that path.
Could be recent actions will make them re-think through, and at least for Star Wars they pulled back from that abyss.
The politics in The Last Jedi didn't suck because they were woke, they sucked because they were preachy. Being preachy generally means you're talking down to the audience, and most people hate that, even when they agree with the message.
Though honestly, the thing that really pissed me off is Rise of the Skywalker taking the actress who got targeted by the alt-right and basically writing her out of the movie. When it comes to reasons for screwing someone's career "sorry, we didn't want to piss off the bigots
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Disney as a whole could only lose money if the whole company take up daytime drinking, because they own everything. Welcome to the end goal of capitalism.
Was given a year's sub as a gift, it didn't take (Score:1)
Disney+ spends a lot on "production values" as they say, but in the end I never found anything I really liked. After watching a handful of older films that I enjoyed for nostalgia value, I tried every other channel category they had. I never made it past just a couple of episodes in a series, or more than a few scenes in a movie. Sure, the woke crap was annoying (they put a "trigger warning" on Aladdin because reasons, for Pete's sake), but mainly it was just kind of meh.
I think a lot of these media compani
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When we can see what anti-parent, pro-groomer whackadoodle support does to their bottom line...
It costs almost 1/3 the price of an annual Disney+ subscription just to park your car at the Magic Kingdom Transportation and Ticket Center in Florida. The parking lot itself is so big there is literally a public transportation system just to get people to and from the various sections of the parking lot.
It is hilarious some people actually believe cancelling their cheap-ass streaming service is going to convince Disney to stop being "woke". That is chump change compared to what people spend at the theme
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If their streaming venture crashes and burns due to market disapproval of their stance on sexualizing young kids against their parents permission, then YEAH.
Disney has been a child-safe brand for decades.
If that's changing, parents ought to know and be able to make informed decisions.
Nobody thinks Disney's going to be put out of business COMPLETELY.
But having a venture like D+ die due to something like this will send a precedental message.
Also, the removal of their deal with Florida just cost them an ASSLOA
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I do not support companies that support genoside (Score:3)
So no Disney products for me.
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Yes, any company doing business with China is partially responsible. And yes thus I cannot avoid them all.
But not every company publicly thanks the security services of Xinjiang province like Disney did.
It is like thanking Gestapo or Schutzstaffel for their help in the 1940s Germany. Even if the actual thing you thank them for has nothing to do with the genocide.
Also many companies at least try to get rid of the things produced by Uyghur slave labor. That is kind of halfway silly as the whole Chinese sta
No to old shows and mmovies (Score:1)
How many of these subs are real? (Score:2)
I'd imagine that I counted by Disney as a subscriber, even though I get the service for "free" from my cellular provider.
I would never pay more than $2 a month for this service if I had to, as the fresh content library just isn't there.
I'm about to dump it. (Score:2)
The incredibly slow speed at which new content arrives can't justify me keeping it any longer.