Star Wars, Marvel & ESPN: How Disney plans to take on Netflix in streaming

Disney is matching Netflix's standard plan and marketing the service $3 below its rival's premium version, which lets subscribers and their family members watch on as many as four devices at once.

Business Standard : Walt Disney Co. is pricing a new bundle of streaming services at a surprisingly low $12.99 a month, challenging Netflix Inc. with a package that includes family programming, live sports and a deep library of television shows.

The entertainment giant announced the combined pricing for Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu on a conference call Tuesday with investors. It will debut as part of the November launch of the Disney+ service and represents a near 30% discount to their individual prices.

Disney is matching Netflix’s standard plan and marketing the service $3 below its rival’s premium version, which lets subscribers and their family members watch on as many as four devices at once. But two of the Disney services, ESPN+ and Hulu, carry advertising, while Netflix is commercial-free.

The company’s crusade to become a streaming giant has been a costly one. Investments in new online services led to a $553 million loss in Disney’s direct-to-consumer division, part of generally disappointing results released on Tuesday. And that deficit is expected to rise to $900 million in the current quarter.

But Disney’s trove of films and TV shows from its Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars brands will make it a formidable competitor, said Ivan Feinseth, chief investment officer at New York’s Tigress Financial Partners LLC.

“Disney has powerful content,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.

HBO Max

The aggressive pricing could also create headaches for HBO Max, a streaming service from AT&T Inc. that’s scheduled to launch next spring. That package also will offer family programming and original shows. The cost for that package hasn’t been announced yet. But HBO alone costs $14.99 a month, suggesting that it will be hard to compete with Disney’s price.

Disney is betting online services will counter the loss of conventional TV viewers for flagship channels like ESPN, ABC and the Disney Channel. Earlier this year, the company spent $71 billion acquiring the movie and TV assets of Fox to bolster its future offerings.

With Hulu + Live TV, the company also offers a package of 60-plus live television channels intended to compete with cable and satellite services for $44.99 a month.

Game of Thrones: Piracy 'better than Emmy' for HBO as it battles Netflix

The competition for the Iron Throne on the screen is paralleled - in the real world - by the epic struggle for supremacy in television production.

Eight years after the first season premiered, the long-awaited winter has finally come – Game of Thrones’ final season is here. The television series created by David Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss from the books by George RR Martin has built a rich and complex multi-thread plot-knot of epic battles, of the living and the undead, of long owed-debts to be paid, and of the culmination of clan stratagems to win the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms.

But at the end of season seven in the autumn of 2017, it wasn’t the clan warfare that had us cliffhanging, but the thought of the army of undead white walkers and their zombie dragon bearing down on Westeros.

Many millions of fans are waiting breathlessly for the denouement – and it’s a legion of fans that has grown exponentially over the eight-year run. In the US, for example, the audience has grown from 2.5m viewers in the first season (2011) to an average of 10.3m during season seven, which peaked at more than 12m viewers during the season seven finale on August 27, 2017.

According to MUSO, a magazine which specialises in piracy, the first episode of season seven alone was pirated 91.74m times and the season accumulated more than a billion illegal downloads a week after it ended.

So many people viewing outside of the official channels doesn’t just suggest the incredibly large audience GoT can attract, it also demonstrates the growth in illegal downloading of television shows – 11% last year – despite the effort of the streaming technologies to kill off piracy.

Piracy has its rewards

But this hasn’t necessarily been a problem for HBO. In 2013, the boss of Time-Warner (which owns HBO), Jeff Bewkes, declared that piracy was: “Better than an Emmy” because more people watching the show inevitably led to more people deciding to pay for subscriptions. He said: We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years – people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.

Since then, GoT has repeatedly become the most pirated series of all time in every season. And with season seven this record was broken yet again.

Business Standard

Winter is coming: Game of Thrones final season to start airing on April 14

The video clip shows Jon Snow, Sansa and Arya - three members of the Stark family - making their way through the crypts under their family home.

Winter is coming to scorch the TV screens as "Game of Thrones" returns for one last time on April 14 with its eighth season.

HBO on Monday announced the premiere date of the hit series last installment on its official Twitter account.

90 days, 23 hours, 55 min, 27 seconds pic.twitter.com/ZxaPAmwf36

— HBO (@HBO) January 14, 2019

The network also offered a 90 second-long "offical tease", captioned as: "April 14. #ForTheThrone."

The video clip shows Jon Snow, Sansa and Arya - three members of the Stark family - making their way through the crypts under their family home.

The viewer hears messages their from dead family members Ned and Catelyn Stark as well as Lyanna Stark, Ned's sister and the mother Jon never knew.

When the troika reaches the crypt's end, they come face-to-face with their own statues. As confusion clouds their faces, a fallen feather starts turning into ice and the crypt fills up with fog, cautioning that the winter is here.

Last wee, HBO debuted new footage from the eighth season -- that featured Jon, Sansa and Daenerys Targaryen -- as part of its 2019 line-up.

The network announced last November that the show's final season will premiere in April 2019.

Season eight has six episodes - each of which could run as long as 90 minutes.

The shooting began in October 2017 and wrapped 10 months later.

Business Standard