[geraldwhen]

Disney could have done that and I would have paid.

But they don’t make shows people want to watch any more. Live action Mulan could have been awesome! But they destroyed the themes of family honor and removed the music and comedy.

Pander fatigue is real. I’ve got kids but I’m letting my Disney sub lapse. Anime is way better than the schlock Disney puts out.

[doctorpangloss]

The streamers make some shows that some people want to watch.

Netflix’s report, first of its kind, showed 20 titles that you will have never heard of unless you use TikTok.

Most people are watching the shows most other people are watching, it’s memetic. People want to feel like they’re a part of something; that is they’re are willing to pay $20/mo in Fear of Missing Out.

Nobody has FOMO for old Disney content. The largest expense for Netflix is creating content, all the shows in that report were from 2022 and 2023.

The kicker is that it’s the opposite of the top of the Steam charts, indicating how bad of a business the streamers are in. Those games are most free and have been around for a long time, sometimes decades.

Both games and TV/movies were threatened by piracy. Yet the result for TV/movies was wildly undercharging for the stuff people were pirating - giving away the old catalogue content on the premise they were competing with $0, simultaneously ceasing to monetize their pay to play audience. Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement, which would have been much much cheaper and effective. TV/movies just do not have enough secular ways to innovate like games do to completely supplant piracy from a technological and social perspective.

Two takeaways: (1) the pay to watch model model was much more sustainable, because most content makes way more sense to sell for those payers, it was non-FOMO content, it was good content. (2) in order to make most of the highly engaged streaming content sustainable, streamers must innovate in monetization, and it’s not obvious if ads will be enough.

[theGnuMe]

My kids watch minecraft and roblox streams ad infinitumon youtube though.. I pay for ad free youtube and ad free streaming services but they still know of and want the latest toys. It's amazing. My kids never want to watch a movie or tv show, only youtube.

[Beldin]

> Huge mistake: they should have wildly increased enforcement

They did. However, it turns out that often, you're suing upstanding citizens for what the public views as minor infractions. This does not really recoup costs. It does act as a deterrent, both for Joey Public to illegally download your content, but also for them to spend money on acquiring your content legally. For some reason, the big fish are hard to catch, and catching one doesn't move the needle on illegally downloaded content much.

Moreover, they're not just competing with illegally downloaded content. Disney's back catalogue has been sold for literally decades. I bet that before the era of streaming, most folks lived within 10 houses of a legal, viewable copy of Disney's big hits (Lion King, Aladdin, Little Mermaid, etc). And if not, physical media of such movies and series are typically available on 2nd-hand markets for very affordable prices*. That's what the back catalogue of Disney (and others) needs to compete with first and foremost.

* case in point: I bought a 7 season, 24ish episode/season series on Ebay for 50. Watching it with the envisioned company (ie. no binging) took months; streaming would have been more expensive already at 5 bucks per month.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

Gabe Newell had it right, piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.

[jl6]

All the old Disney back catalog is still new to my kids so they just watch that and ignore the new junk.

[lolinder]

It depends on the age of the kids—for the price of a Disney+ subscription you can buy ~2 DVDs a month, which at my kid's age (4 and 2) is way more frequently than they actually want to watch new movies. When I was a kid, (and I'm seeing it with my own kids) we had a tiny selection of movies that we loved to watch repeatedly. Why pay rent for that selection when you could own it for the same price?

[geraldwhen]

I may do something like this if Disney ever creates good content again on accident.

I bought puss and boots 2 last year on release, and that movie was excellent.

[Solvency]

Is that true for all kids? I thought popular opinion was that all new gen kids have insatiable content appetites with low attention spans demanding constant newness?

[iteria]

My 4 year old has had unlimited access to most services since 2. Mostly what she does is watches the same 10ish hours of content whatever that is for about a month. And then she picks another 10 hours. This 10 hours may or may not include things from previous 10 hour binges.

Kids like repetition. They are perfectly willing to watch the same season of something over and over again even when they could technically choose to watch something brand new

[lolinder]

If you feed them a constant stream of new content, yeah, they'll probably be that way, but they're not born with an insatiable desire for novel consumption.

[harimau777]

I think it depends on the person. Other than a few favorites, I've never tended to rewatch movies, reread books, replay games, etc. I think that a lot of it may be that a lot of the appeal to me is in "figuring out" the content so that once I know how things play out I don't care all that much about reexperiencing the playing out itself.

[falcor84]

Well maybe not everyone, but most of us are born with some level of Novelty Seeking [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_seeking

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I don't think that's a good argument. You find "new" when rewatching. The moment is not engaging anymore, it means you drained the entirety of the content

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

You create your own monsters. my 2 years old must have watched the mario movie 200 times at least. I was like him, I watched Aladdin 200 times.

[vel0city]

I imagine this greatly depends on the age of the kids and their immediate friend groups. A very young child generally isn't going to care or even understand some movie or show is old or not, everything in life is new to them.

[voakbasda]

Or is that just what the content producers want you to believe in order to get you to sign up the the latest streaming service?

[dpflan]

Important point about relative novelty, but kids aren’t subscribers / account holders / bill payers, so I can see how the population with children can become a persistent subscriber base, but growth requirements necessitate either more children (joking) or providing better content.

It’s pretty interesting to think about how technology and scalability play into the costs of the streaming model. Netflix’s engineering capabilities are well respected, I find it hard for another company to replicate this success without using better technology to offer the same service: do we know the technological infrastructure quality of Disney+ or Hulu? Have they encountered costly scaling problems that eat into budgets?

[GaryNumanVevo]

Not to backseat parent or anything, but I would never let my kids watch Anime unsupervised. Disney is fine, and they aren't going to sexualize minors like anime often does.

[jMyles]

...I'm really having trouble understanding this comment. Maybe my sarcasm detector is broken?

Watching anything unsupervised is of course age-dependent, so I'm not sure I understand the mechanism at work in that part of the comment.

But on the deeper matter of Disney vs. anime:

Obviously anime is a huge basket, so it depends on what studio and creator(s) we're talking about.

There's plenty of amazing, reinforcing, validating, positive anime to be found. The Miyazaki films are, without exception, lovely and perfectly messaged for kids of all ages, including this 41-year-old. There are many other non-Miyazaki works from Studio Ghibli that are similarly friendly.

Disney, on the other hand, absolutely sexualizes and gaslights vulnerable populations. I loved Beauty and the Beast growing up, but in retrospect I realize that it taught a generation of little girls to endure abuse in the hopes of some magical transformation. Aladin is horrifyingly racist and two-dimensional. Pocahontes? Holy fuck.

Compare the Disney and Ghibli renditions of The Little Mermaid and tell me which one is made with greater concern over kids' worldview and mental health, let alone faithful passage of the ecological message of novel.

The Disney formula is very often predicated on a woman whose value is in her sexuality and virginity, with men who are divided into distinctly "good" and "evil" camps who fight over her. It's absolutely the kind of sexualization that is toxic for kids.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

The truth is kids are resiliant and not stupid. generations "survived" these types of stereotypes and in 20 years someone else will be wringing their hands about the misguided stereotypes the current crop of acceptable movies is involved in (including everything you listed as a positive).

I would never hesitate to allow a child to watch any disney movie, but I definitely would hesitate to allow a child to watch Berserk or a lot of the borderline loli content. I remember watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and waiting for the hammer to drop on the PE teacher who was constantly creeping on the teenage girls. When the season ended and it never happened I was completely confused, it wasn't until years later I found out that's an actual trope that shows up in a lot of anime.

What I'm saying is that I don't disagree with you that there are plenty of anime that's perfectly fine for children to watch, but the other posters concern is absolutely valid too, there's a lot of anime children shouldn't be watching (opening scene of elfin lied anyone?) and your hand wringing about Disney movies not being perfect doesn't move that needle in the slightest.

[harimau777]

I'm not sure it's a fair to compare your average Disney movie to famously transgressive/extreme examples of anime like Berserk or Elfin Lied. That would be like comparing One Piece to something like Watership Down.

For every Berserk or Elfin Lied there's a Bocchi the Rock! or Spy Family.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

True. I mean, I let them watch anime I already watched (that's a huge catalog), so I know what to expect

[ryaneager]

Where was unsupervised consumption mentioned? Quit your pearl clutching.

[GaryNumanVevo]

I think you've misread my comment and OP's comment here