Disney is banking on a password crackdown and spate of sequels as it pushes to make its streaming business profitable.
The company, which is under pressure as audiences move away from traditional pay-TV and cinema, said it was on track to meet its goals after new subscribers and price rises helped to narrow losses in its streaming business.
Several million
Which every company saw, and that’s why they’re all gonna do this too.
I know I’m just an anecdote but Netflix had some ridiculous deal where I paid $75 for a year of Starz and I got Netflix for free. So they got to pretend like they didn’t lose me when in reality I was imminently going to quit due to the password crackdown.
So much of modern business is just hoodwinking investors into thinking infinite growth is possible.
Sure, but note the second part of my post.
The second part of your post is too vague and subjective to comment on. Are accountants not supposed to be happy with an additional $59 million in subscription revenue? That’s all in a 3-month period.
And even if not, note the rest of the article. They’re not solely cracking down on password sharing, the service is getting more expensive too. They all are. Disney is not charting new territory with any of this.
The thing is that this isn’t an endpoint. We’ve got corporations that comfortably clear multiple billions in profit each quarter and the investors get sad when that number doesn’t keep going up because that was last quarter. It’s like the world’s fattest men insist that they’re starving to death. Investors will be satisfied with this for a quarter, and then they’ll have to turn to some other scheme to try and inflate profits further. I get that this is nominally how capitalism is supposed to work, but I think that putting the investor as the first, last, and only consideration has caused a proliferation of slash-and-burn style short-termism. It’s fake growth because it’s not actually sustainable, everyone knows it, but you just try and keep it up until the next short term scheme can keep your stonks inflated.
Imo, the market has already shown that it won’t bear infinite growth in streaming services (what with every network trying to start their own proprietary netflix-priced service), and they’re going to start running into that ceiling again as they all start to raise prices. The consumer just doesn’t have unlimited money, especially after the Fed pooped its pants when workers got their first real wage growth in 40 years and decided that it was a nightmare inflation scenario.
It’s very true. When the owner-class still dominated decision-making, there was a level of rationality in firm behavior - as there were owners who felt that the firm was their property, they were motivated to keep it healthy. Shear the sheep. From the viewpoint of the owner, this is rational - there is no sense in destroying what makes you money in the long term.
But investors have no such urge, and as the investor-class has come to dominate decision-making and not just capital allocation, they’ve begun slaughtering the sheep to gorge themselves and move onto the next. This, from their viewpoint, is perfectly rational decision-making - they are maximizing their gain from each investment, wringing it dry, and then leaving what’s left (preferably before the stock crashes) to find a new, healthy host. I mean, investment. They have no incentive to maintain the health of the firm, not even in an exploitative sense. What is it that Marx calls them? Rentier capitalists?
It’s not sustainable. Not even by capitalism’s admittedly low standards.
I’m not sure what’s too vague about it. If the decision isn’t going to generate them enough revenue for it to make enough of a difference to the people who care about the profits, then they may find out that it wasn’t worth doing in the long-term. Considering Disney’s profits, that sounds like a drop in the bucket.
It’s a win-win situation for the streaming companies no matter what. The people who weren’t paying will either stop watching entirely (no longer costing Disney anything) or they pay up and become an additional subscriber. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small increase in profits or not, it’s still an increase so it’s happening.
You can scroll back through older social media posts from when Netflix announced this. How many folks said they were done? How much did that cost Netflix in the end? Literally nothing!
PR always has a cost.
That remains to be seen here. Netflix was all “love is sharing your password” and now they’re “fuck you pay up” and they’re being rewarded with millions of subs.
I get where you’re coming from but so far there’s no data to back up what you’re saying.