It seems unclear how feasible that may be. The only thing keeping me wanting to use Netflix is quality content, which has been in decline recently. Given all of the recognizable brands under the Disney name, maybe people will switch. At a technical level, I question their ability to pull off offering a service as large as Netflix with high availability. Netflix offers very competitive compensation to their engineering talent.
To be clear, Disney is pulling the content from existing monetizations -- including Netflix -- to try to monetize it on their own platforms. This isn't free real estate. There is a very real cost.
And Netflix is going to put the money they aren't paying Disney to produce their own content and buy up other content.
Disney is playing a very risky gambit here.
Disney+ can be a fantastic success if Disney gets it right, because they do have lots of excellent content. But if they don't take the engineering side seriously, it's going to fail.
If Disney just wanted to focus on making good movies and TV shows, which clearly is what they're best at, dealing with Netflix would have been perfect for them. If they want to be a tech company instead, they really need to follow through and commit to that.
Disney has way deeper pockets than Netflix, they can afford to play the long game, spending their revenue on gaining market shares.
They already do that.
Solo and The Last Jedi are still under Netflix for now
This part I don't get. The intersection of people who love MLB but are the best talent you're looking for, may not be aligned. If you want great engineers, you shouldn't care whether or not they particularly like MLB. It's a weird hiring funnel. Not all projects demand the best talent, but if Disney Plus wants 60 million subscribers, they should be poaching Netflix, or at least hiring that level of talent.
Netflix pays very well but also works its tech workers hard.
this is how Blizzard pays as well. their engineering compensation is just sad. but hey, it's Blizzard!
I would assume this was due them wanting me to see what else they had, or maybe feel like having to scroll would make it seem like they had a lot. Or maybe it was incompetence. Either way, I saw no reason for them to inconvenience me, so I canceled Netflix.
I agree, though, I'd really like to have a _full listing_ of shows.
Netflix faces the same challenge that Facebook does with the news feed in that they're trying to combine two functions into the one interface that the users are familiar with.
Netflix, for example, could easily have multiple modes. A discover based on my past preferences/popularity mode and a categorical listing mode. The problem is them blending these two together and then prioritizing their content arbitrarily over other better recommendations.
The home page is for discovery based on your past preferences/popularity. And there are TV and movie pages in which you can display shows by genre or even A-Z.
Disclosure: I work at Netflix and would like to make it better for everyone who uses it.
When I go to Hamburger -> Anime, or Hamburger -> TV shows, it has the same style of semi-logical groupings of categories as I see normally: Crime shows, action shows, classic shows, suggestions for me, etc -- but there seems to be no affordances to affect ordering, nor menu items that would reflect that. The settings menu is useless, as it consists only of links to the account details, privacy statement, and terms of use.
I really hope that the answer isn't "Log into our website instead of using our native app!", though perhaps the feature warrants such an experiment.
In the Android mobile app, which has recently seen some excellent improvements, I'm unable to find an alphabetical listing as well. One can select genres, and TV shows vs movies, but there are no affordances for sorting, only a wall of categories to scroll through.
[1] - https://reelgood.com/
2. That's well hidden! Thanks for the tip!
From third party sites that index Netflix content, looks like they have a little under 3000 movies, most of which I’ve never heard of.
Versus Disney+, which seems to have over 600 movies with quite a few big titles.
Though as other commenters note, making the interface nicer for the user is, apparently, contrary to their interests, or they'd stop doing the exact opposite so much.
I don't get it. Go play these things yourself, but apparently kids love to watch others play, and there's tons and tons of that on Youtube.
Because it sure as hell is not the opportunity costs of having their content on their own streaming service. Like Toy Story 4 released months ago, did a billion in cinema, but they still won't have it on Disney+ until.. somewhere in 2020. Their version of "betting the company" is "all the stuff you used to have on Netflix, but now you are paying extra".
Streaming Video is incredibly fragmented. It's honestly frustrating. I don't want to subscribe to 5 services. I currently have Hulu+Live, and it has ESPN, and lots of other channels I like, but doesn't have the local Fox station, or the local ABC station (only the national fox news and abc news).
Excessive Fragmentation is going to cause everyone to go back to pirating stuff, like they did before Netflix made it too cheap and easy to bother.
They are all playing to kill Netflix and other competition so they can establish monopoly like they had on cable.
I actually went looking for an app on the Samsung app store and found several Disney-branded things that just added to my confusion. One seemed to be streaming TV but 1) it didn't seem to have any recent content, and 2) when I tried it, it wanted me to sign in with my "local TV provider", which just makes me shake my head.
My initial experience as a willing consumer doesn't give me much hope they're gonna pull this off...
But maybe they're looking for access to whatever special SDK the big boys (Netflix, Google) get so they can make their branding folks happy (more consistency with experience on other platforms). I'd imagine developing with that's more involved.
Samsung, some kind of custom Android probably? TV operating systems are a pain in the ass to test, fairly expensive to develop for, and relatively bad at drawing actual usage no matter how widely they're deployed. Might be the delay there. Big enough service needs to pay attention to that junk eventually, but I could see them dropping that for launch.
https://news.samsung.com/us/disney-plus-launches-samsung-sma...
Assuming Disney+ finds its footing, the stage is set for a Hulu/Disney+ duopoly. Comcast and Disney will starve Netflix, Amazon, et al for popular content, while simultaneously bleeding them on exorbitant license fees for the minimal selection they'll be willing to offer.
Instead of switching between Netflix and Amazon Video, most consumers will switch between Hulu for Comcast-owned content (Universal, NBC, others) and Disney+ for Disney-owned content (Disney, ABC, Fox, Pixar, and many more). Netflix subscriptions will lapse accordingly.
Meet the new boss -- same as the old boss. About the only way this is better for the consumer than the old-school cable setup is that municipalities won't be signing exclusive contracts with cable cos barring any competition for decades-long periods of time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/business/media/disney-hul...
I think the ultimate reality still stands, just s/Hulu/TBD Streaming/g. Comcast will roll their own competitor at some point. Rent-by-mail is one thing, but when it's just moving bits around, it doesn't make sense to outsource to a licensee like Netflix anymore.
Unless Netflix can figure out how to lobby and legislate with the same supreme competence they apply to systems engineering, their long-term prospects as an independent entity are bleak. The copyright regime will be their downfall.
First they have XFinity Flex. Their competitor to Roku.
Then they have Peacock, which at the moment looks like a competitor to CBS All Access. Coming soon.
Somewhere in between a channel and a platform you have Live TV broadcast. Who knows how they will brand it in the long run (they will want you to pay for their variant of "cable service / satellite".) ATM they have the Xfinity Stream Beta App on Roku.
They also have the NBC Family of streaming apps: bravo, e!, nbc, oxygen, syfy, telemundo, universo, usa. They would absolutely benefit from a single "guide" interface like ATT TV Now/ / PlutoTV.
https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/fx-hulu-disney-mrs-america...
It also mentions that Disney has asked Fox Searchlight to consider more of its project slate for Hulu Original instead of theaters, which aligns with how much Netflix and Amazon have been investing in independent films for (nearly) straight to streaming distribution.
How's that for a barrier to entry? I don't doubt that they will be able to hit it, but it's still a mind-bogglingly high number. I think that's part of why I'd like to see Netflix's continued success - competition is a good thing, and if they were to ever go under I doubt we'd see a replacement.