I would say it's debatable as to whether YouTube has been harmful. I think many aren't a fan of the licensing changes and other experience elements, but maybe those would have happened anyway.

I agree w/ Pixar to some extent, but it seems they have seen a slight decline in quality recently (Cars 2, Monsters University, Brave). I think particularly, they may be looking for more opportunities to exploit previous franchises vs. making quality films. Cars 2 was the best example of this, as was evident by the mounds of merchandise on store shelves following the release.

Again, both of these are debatable, but I still don't think you can say in either case that the acquisition was favorable to the consumer.

I think youtube wouldn't have managed to continue operations without a company like google stepping in. It was running massive bandwidth costs and did not have the ad network in place to monetize.

> Pixar is still making (some) good movies under Disney.

Pixar movie quality seems to have dropped, while Disney's have gone up after the acquisition.

http://i.imgur.com/H2s4hVL.jpg

Cars 2 was clearly a release for money (they make more money of Cars merchandise than they do from films), but the other films?

Even with a handful of merely good movies, we still have four outstanding Pixar films post-Disney.

Also, I'm really enjoying the increase in quality of Disney movies post-Pixar. Just saw Frozen last week and loved it.

But given the timeline of producing those types of films, I wonder how much of those four was already in-motion prior to the deal closing?

I'm sure that all of them were, actually, which makes the post-purchase Pixar picture less pretty.

I think what helps explain this image is that it's likely everything before Cars 2 was already in development prior to the acquisition. Pixar seems to have lost some of their magic, however Disney is certainly stepping up their game. The aesthetic divide between them is shrinking. I did not like Wreck It Ralph though. Not at all.

Before Pixar was acquired by Disney they had a partnership.

Another example: Bungie made some great games under Microsoft.

Funny, I would have held Pixar and YouTube up as counterexamples.