Streaming is about to get a lot more expensive

[Ohiogal]

New York(CNN Business) Disney threw down the gauntlet to its competitors last week, with a slate of remarkable programming on Disney+ alongside some eye-popping subscriber numbers and forecasts.

Fans of Disney+ will have roughly 10 new series from Marvel and Star Wars alongside a cornucopia of other content. Disney plans on spending between $14 billion and $16 billion across its streaming ventures to make all those shows and movies.

Someone has to pay for all that content -- and that someone is probably you, the customer. If Disney wants to achieve its forecast of hitting profitability in fiscal 2024, it has to raise prices.

It said it will do that in March. And, after that, it'll likely have to do it again.

"Increasingly streaming, in general, is taking a greater share of the consumer's wallet," Bernie McTernan, a senior analyst at Rosenblatt Securities, told CNN Business.

And it's not just Disney (DIS) that is raising prices. Netflix (NFLX) has already announced a price increase and other competitors may have to do the same if they want to produce the kind of content Disney showed it could while remaining a stable business.

More
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/13/media/streaming-price-disney-netflix/index.html

[Ohiogal]

1. Whatever happened to

“competition brings prices down”?

[mr_lebowski]

2. To be fair the quality of content does keep rising and you can still get a few streaming services

for less than the cost of basic cable.

I suspect cable is going to have to start coming down in response.

[jimfields33]

3. That'd be nice

I still am a last dinosaur who has cable. I like it. Sorry not popular anywhere really. Lol. Although I still do streaming on Netflix and Hulu. I like having regular tv from time to time. And a lot of it I DVR.

[Kashkakat v.2.0]

4. How bout cable offering stuff people might actually want to watch - 200 channels of still nothing

on that's worth watching - is not anything Id want to pay for, given the alternatives. Being able to watch what you want, when you want - oncce youve had a taste of that, youre not gonna want to go back to regular TV..... except for sports and news maybe.

[stopbush]

5. Indeed. And no longterm contacts with streaming services.

I wonder how many families impacted financially by events of the past year are dealing with cable contracts they can’t get out of. $100+ a month can be a lot, and the fact that you have to pay a severe penalty if you opt to stop cable service before your contract ends is so 1970s.

I have YTTV - which includes sports and local news.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

6. I find it highly annoying that there are about

76 different streaming services, not that I've actually counted them all. But I certainly can't afford to have even a half dozen. I have Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. If something isn't on one of those, oh, well. I do without.

[Cuthbert Allgood]

7. It is frustrating, but it's nice to be able to hop on.

If I want to binge some cool new series on HBO Max or Disney, I can just do it for a month and then cancel.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

8. I know people who do that, but I just don't watch all that much.

I read more than I watch anything.

I don't happen to own a regular TV, so I watch stuff via the internet, including the three services I do have.

I read a lot more than I watch stuff.

[Ohiogal]

10. I'm with you.

Most of what’s on TV bores me. I’d rather read or listen to music.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. I will say that we are currently in a truly

Golden Age of Television. Whatever your personal tastes are, there is plenty to watch. Not to mention, many old TV shows are available to watch or re-watch. And even if everything I like you think is dreck, and vice versa, we have much to choose from.

I will admit to getting bored quickly myself. Worse yet, I know enough history and science and other stuff to be driven bat-shit crazy by inaccuracies. I watched maybe two episodes of The Crown before I had to give it up because of huge and blatant things they got wrong. To start with, Prince Phillip was hardly a loving and kind father to Charles. I have had the misfortune to have read a fair number of good biographies of the Royal Family that I just couldn't stomach it.

It happens to me in fiction stuff. Have you seen Emily in Paris? That she gets sent to Paris not speaking word one of French was something I was barely willing to overlook. She claims to be trying to learn the language but after a few weeks she speaks less French than I do of Urdu. But what made me turn it off was when, on a sex chat with her boyfriend she pulls out her vibrator and starts to go to town with it. No, that's not what bothered me. Somehow she had been there for several weeks with zero awareness that the electricity is different in Europe as compared to the United States. She should at least have been shown fumbling for the converter she needed.

I've travelled overseas and *I* know these things. Surely someone connected to the show had a clue.

Well, okay, I'm an old fogy and I really don't want to see a scene where someone is going to town with a vibrator, but I realize I'm old and not really the target audience for that show. But they could still get the bit about needing a converter right.

[Dream Girl]

13. Ummm vibrators use batteries not electricity

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. Hers was a plug in.

And it blew all the circuits in her apartment building.

Just another reason to get disgusted at the vast inaccuracies in some TV shows or movies.

[Auggie]

15. A "Golden Age" -- I agree

Not to say there still isn't a load of crap out there. But ... without networks competing for a common denominator (usually set to a low bar) there's some very smart niche programming that under network rule would never see the light of day.

The ability to jump from one streaming service to another. No commercials. No censorship. No taboos. You get to pick what to watch and when, not a network programmer. And for about of half what Xfinity charges.

Inaccuracies are part of Hollywood story telling. That'll never change.

[hunter]

9. Possibly less than cable or satellite if Disney is what you like.

My wife and I quit traditional television a long time ago.

Our television plays DVDs and Netflix mostly. No broadcast, no cable, no satellite.

Netflix is $8.99 a month. We'd have the internet anyways, both of us for our work, and no, we do not deduct as work expense because 90% of our home bandwidth is for fun, including my posts here DU.

I'm frequently astonished when people tell me how much they pay for television or when they complain about television commercials. I never see most television commercials and I never run out of things to watch on my television.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

12. Oh, yes! The very best thing about no TV is no commercials.

This is the fourth time in my semi-long life that I haven't had TV, the longest time without, and at this point I know I'll never have regular TV again. It's especially wonderful during an election year, isn't it?

When I first moved to Santa Fe some 12 years ago, I didn't get a TV for several reasons. First was that I didn't want/couldn't afford to spend the money on an actual TV. Second was that I couldn't afford the cable fee. Third, and oddly enough this was the most important, the cable hookup for a TV was under the one large window in the living room, which means a TV would be blocking the window. Really? In a place where we have such wonderful light? I'd need to have the blinds drawn all the time, and that made no sense to me.

So I didn't get a TV. I saw it as an experiment, even though three other times in my life I'd been without TV for months or even years. I assumed after a while I'd get one. But then I discovered I could watch most of what I wanted over the internet. I moved here in July, 2008, and watched both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention streaming on some network or another. Probably MSNBC.

Here's something else for those without regular TV. Any time some sort of breaking news happens: serious tornadoes, a Congressional Representative gets shot, fires encroaching on Los Angeles, perhaps a damaging earthquake somewhere in the country, local TV stations often go to live streaming. When I hear of such news I simply google TV stations in that city and check them out. What's even more interesting, is that the local stations are often far more interesting than the national version on whatever network you prefer to watch. The network will keep on cutting away from the local reporters, while the local station stays with them. Always fascinating.

In one of my earlier times without TV, a co-worker was genuinely concerned that I had no idea what was going on in the world. So he'd occasionally quiz me about current events, and was always astonished that I knew what was going on, and sometimes knew more than he did. I read the local newspaper. I read lots of books. More non-fiction than fiction, which helps.