I’m not sure how this will play out.
Disney on Tuesday said it will be pulling its movies from Netflix and will launch a Disney streaming service of its own in 2019. It also said it will launch an ESPN streaming service early next year.
To help do all that, Disney will acquire a majority of BAMTech, the streaming technology company owned by MLBAM, the internet company owned by Major League Baseball. Disney already owned a stake in BAMTech but will pay $1.58 billion for an additional 42 percent.
The Mouse apparently wants to use the ESPN streaming service to focus on and expand on showing actual sporting events, which is one way to make cable television hate Disney with the screaming fury of a hundred billion exploding suns. As would having a streaming service that would probably duplicate Disney’s cable programming, at that. Huh. Maybe that’s it: Disney might be worried that the cable TV industry is going to undergo a subscriber nosedive, and they want to keep their own viewers’ eyeballs.
Huh. I at first assumed that this was just an attempt to stop the bleeding from a bad quarter. Which it could be. But if there’s anything people will pay out money for, it’s stuff like streaming sports and children’s programming. Heck, I might grab a Disney streaming service. Especially if Marvel and/or Star Wars does come along for the ride.
Their nosedive is primarily precipitated by ESPN sucking, for… various reasons*. Doubling down on that franchise will only work if they return to just showing sports with out any of the commentary*.
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OTOH, ESPN has been the only thing propping up cable for years. Good riddance to that mess, regardless of DisneyOnline success.
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*IfYouKnowWhatIMeanAndIThinkYouDo.
Let us not forget that Disney also owns Touchstone.
They’ve got a lot of content that they own outright.
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I don’t see ESPN being profitable in the near future, though.
They should have stuck with lumberjack sports and strongman competitions rather than injecting political commentary explicitly hostile to their audience.
I used to very well disposed towards them. Now, I kind of want to see them caught in a grease fire.
That’s the thing, though. Imagine, for a moment, that ESPN Streaming makes accessible a library of all the existing sporting events that it has legal access to. Even if it’s for, say, a month at a time, that’s still valuable, right? And if you’re streaming it, you don’t actually have to watch the idiot talking heads. You can just watch the actual game.
I think this will work out okay for Disney…this time…and not-so-great to horrible for everyone else.
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Say what you will about cable, or about satellite services like DirecTV. But they have one undeniable advantage over streaming services…at least the way those services are now developing. I know — I know — that the dozen or so channels I watch regularly, and the two dozen more from which I graze, are available to me anytime I want.*
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* (Barring, of course, those lovely little messages that pop up underneath the screen at contract renewal time, saying that “If you subscribe to X, please know that the following networks owned by Y Corp. will not be available to you in a week unless something is done right now. Lean on your provider for us.” Screw you both. Work out your own problems, because if I miss my episodes, you’re both getting blame from me.)
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I don’t want to maintain multiple accounts across a bunch of different streaming services to get the content I know I want to see, and maintain access to the stuff I *might* want to see in future. It’s the cable problem exploded. Sure, I pay for several hundred channels right now and only watch a few. So now I’m supposed to pay for access to hundreds of thousands of programs across multiple platforms, only a few of which I’ll ever get to see…and when something I want to watch vanishes, frantically find it elsewhere?
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I hate technology.