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.
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.