Disney didn't have to do any market testing. It's very obvious that people will pay for access to their portfolio. I bet they're more worried the service cannibalizes their DVD/Blu-ray sales than that the service itself isn't popular enough.

And since they already had the content and the marketing channels, the only thing they had to spend real money on is engineering. There's also a lot of cachet attached to working for Disney so I bet hiring talent was not an issue.

> I bet they're more worried the service cannibalizes their DVD/Blu-ray sales than that the service itself isn't popular enough.

I'm guessing they would love for Disney+ to replace DVD/Blu-ray sales. Rather than making a one time sale, the customer pays for it every month! Forever!

A lot of customers are probably very happy to pay a monthly fee just to avoid having their DVD wear out while the movie is “in the vault”. Children play these things like 10 times per day.

Does optical media really wear out?

When kids are involved, yes :)

They also didn’t try to build the product with in-house engineers, they bought the (very good) company BAMTech.

Disney+ isn’t a novel idea. All they really did was give everyone access to their entire library of videos.

Quibi was interesting bec it was trying to be something that no one else was doing, that requires more than an s3 bucket behind a Netflix clone.

The only (good/interesting) thing Quibi was doing that no one else was doing was the switchable view thing.

All the other things they tried were foolish and self-defeating: mobile-only (can't watch on my laptop or TV, which makes it harder to watch with a friend), no screenshots (no sharing/memes to promote conversation about the app or content), etc.

There is an ocean of short-form content creators on YouTube, many of them quite talented, who are increasingly desperate for some kind of alternative platform. It would've been so much cheaper and more effective to scoop up a handful of the better ones to create exclusives than to bank the farm on the waning star-power of establishment Hollywood folk. I don't really understand who the target audience is supposed to be.

I feel bad for the handful of decent shows (there must be a few right?) that are stuck on this weird patronizing-feeling platform. "I, just like you fellow kids, enjoy Music-Band and short-form video content on the Cell-Phone, and Celebrities!" platform.

Did Disney+ do anything new? It took the established model of Netflix and the established content of the Disney empire, and threw them together.

From my understanding, Quibi is a unique usage model, with unproven content, neither of which has initially panned out.

Disney+ is an interesting contrast. They threw a lot of money at proven technology (BAMTech) as well as proven content producers (in-house).

That's the entire point. You don't throw billions at something new -- you prove it out first and then throw billions at it.

They list all their content in alphabetical order.

Disney bought BAMTech for this. Wasn't too much of a leap to expect that a giant content producer/owner (+ distributor) when combined with a huge content distributor would be successful...