Disney and WBD to bundle Disney+/Hulu/Max, bringing us closer to recreating cable

Nobody asked for this.

Oh and ESPN. I forgot they own that.

OK, Disney, HBO, CNN, ESPN, and Discovery brands. $300 with ads, $400 with “limited ads.”

Tangential relationship but Disney has stopped selling physical media in Australia.

Almost all physical media will be produced by third parties soon who license content and you can only order from online.

Hard ]ass

Any idea how much this will cost?

I'm currently paying $36.97 monthly for these services. $20.98 for Disney/Hulu (ad free) and $15.99 for Max (ad free).

Wait. I already get Max as a Hulu add-on and pay one bill. About $25. How is this different?

The combo does not exist r6

This is all about avoiding subscriber churn, competing with Netflix, and staying profitable. Disney only recently started making a small profit in the streaming space.

At launch i would guess at low thirties with ads, forty with “limited ads” (ad-free will not be an option)

BUT there will be more tiers to confuse people

So you can probably add ESPN for an extra 10 dollars.

It most certainly does, r7. I'm on Hulu now and there is a section of Max content

Oh. This does already exist.

So why is this news?

Although it only seems you are limited to HBO content. Diet Max.

Miss me?

R7 It most certainly does. Hulu and Amazon Prime exclusively offer HBO Max add-ons.

Fuck all of them, they promised shareholders continued profiting. When they couldn't deliver, they raised prices and broke apart studio catalogues. Now it's no risk programming to get out of the hole they dug. That's okay, you don't have to watch. The internet will continue to level the playing field, I’d say the next 2 years will be major but for the consumer. Hollywood as an industry is dead, there are other forms of entertainment.

Can I just have 90's and 2000's TCM on a continuous stream, please?

Almost everything that is destabilizing Hollywood right now (with the exception of pandemic related theater attendance not recovering) can be traced to Bob Iger’s decision to launch Disney Plus

Before this, Netflix was the largest consumer of entertainment products and they paid very well. Everyone was happy. If everyone still just relied on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu (3-way Disney/Comcast/Fox partnership) to buy their products, Hollywood wouldn’t have changed so dramatically.

Bob Iger thought he knew better and decided he could top Netflix, but Disney didn’t have enough content to silo to make a viable library. So he decided he needed to buy 20th Century Fox. He eliminated a major film studio to create a platform so cost-intensive he now may be forced to sell.

Because the Justice Department approved the merger, now it is likely Paramount and Sony Pictures will merge, and Comcast will buy Warner Bros. and merge it with Universal.

None of this would have happened if Bob Iger did not buy Fox.

Also TCM will be shut down in Comcast buys Warner Bros.

Again, Bob Iger

Because Bob Iger decided to launch DisneyPlus, AT&T decided to launch HBOMax. TCM was already in a partnership with Criterion and created a wonderful platform called Filmstruck. Jason Kilar decided that it would be more beneficial for HBO Max to have a TCM silo so he withdrew from the partnership. Then AT&T bailed on WarnerMedia because - surprise - streaming was so cost intensive so they sold it to David Zaslav who promptly began to dismantle it. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorcese had to beg him to keep it alive just a little bit longer.

Last year’s TCM Remembers tribute appeared to acknowledge its own demise by focusing on an acrobat (representing TCM) ascending upwards to “heaven” instead of the actual deceased.

Not buying any of this Bob Iger complaining. The real disrupters here are companies like Amazon and Apple which can spend incredible amounts of money on content to bring consumers into larger ecosystems. They’re the real disrupters, and of course the pandemic and changing consumer preferences didn’t help. Old Hollywood was dying with or without Bob Iger. Just look at the mess at Paramount.

I disagree with that because Amazon and Apple’s content spends have simply replicated a longtime Hollywood tradition, fleecing deep-pocketed outsiders. Hollywood has always done this - this is the scene in Mommie Dearest where Louis B Mayer corners Joan Crawford at Perino’s to come sit with his investors.

Apple’s Argylle is a perfect example, this was a midbudget film ($50-60 million) that Apple spent $200 million on. Amazon spent $250 million on Red One, which is basically the equivalent of a midbudget Christmas comedy like Schwarzenegger’s “Jingle All the Way” from the 1990s and is allegedly unreleasable. Hollywood loves spending other people’s money. They do not like spending their own money. DisneyPlus was Iger saying, Let’s just spend our own money and we can be as successful as Netflix. That was not possible. Netflix isn’t even that profitable, it just has a high stock price.

I wouldn't mind a bundle that has Hulu and Disney+ that wasn't a ripoff.

With the way their bundles were priced, it was cheaper for me to pay an annual fee for Disney+ and then pay for monthly Hulu.

They should have a price which is, you know, a discount for having two or more services.

No it will get worse. They will have the “basic package”. Then if you actually want new HBO Programs or new Disney programs, you will have to pay extra. Paramount Plus already does this with Paramount Plus with Showtime.

So let’s say you get a Cabyl+ Yearly subscription, with limited ads. For an extra $30 a year you get HBO new programs or Disney+ new programs, or $50 extra for both.

They are going to recreate the exact same business model as cable.

I have the HULU tv package. It is over 80 dollars a month. It is all the TV channels, hulu, ESPN and disney plus. It used to be under 60 a month but they recently raised it. I may just go back to cable, it's cheaper.

Well, I guess I'll be torrenting everything I want to watch.