vivian334
Member
Cord Cutters flagged the anniversary this week and it is worth sitting with for a second. On 8 August 2017, on a quarterly earnings call, Disney said it was building its own streaming service and ending the licensing deal that had been putting its films on Netflix. Disney+ itself did not arrive until 12 November 2019, at $6.99 a month in the US, Canada and the Netherlands.
That announcement is the moment the whole thing turned, and not in the direction most people noticed at the time. The reporting then was about Netflix losing Marvel and Pixar. What actually happened is that every other studio watched Disney do it and concluded that licensing your library to somebody else was leaving money on the table. Within a few years the catalogue that used to sit in one app was split across five or six, each with its own price rise, its own compression, and its own habit of quietly removing titles.
For those of us who kept buying discs through all of it, this is the anniversary of being proved right. Not because streaming quality is bad, some of it is very good, but because a disc on a shelf cannot be pulled from a catalogue for tax reasons, downgraded to save bandwidth, or lose its Atmos track in an app update. The 6.99 launch price now reads like a promotional stunt, which is exactly what it was.
What is on your shelf purely because a service took it away and you decided you were not going through that again?
That announcement is the moment the whole thing turned, and not in the direction most people noticed at the time. The reporting then was about Netflix losing Marvel and Pixar. What actually happened is that every other studio watched Disney do it and concluded that licensing your library to somebody else was leaving money on the table. Within a few years the catalogue that used to sit in one app was split across five or six, each with its own price rise, its own compression, and its own habit of quietly removing titles.
For those of us who kept buying discs through all of it, this is the anniversary of being proved right. Not because streaming quality is bad, some of it is very good, but because a disc on a shelf cannot be pulled from a catalogue for tax reasons, downgraded to save bandwidth, or lose its Atmos track in an app update. The 6.99 launch price now reads like a promotional stunt, which is exactly what it was.
What is on your shelf purely because a service took it away and you decided you were not going through that again?
