62 The EconomistNovember 16th 2019
1I
n hollywood lingo, Disney+ launched
hot. On blitz day, as Disney called the eve
of its television-streaming service’s debut
on November 12th, a massive marketing
campaign reached a climax. Buses in its
theme parks were wrapped in ads, employ-
ees in Disney shops wore qrcodes for peo-
ple to sign up with smartphones and abc’s
“Dancing with the Stars” trailed the excite-
ment to come. By the end of the first day,
10m people had signed up—beyond Dis-
ney’s highest expectations, it said. Its serv-
ers struggled to cope. The company rushed
to fix the glitches, as viewers devoured
“The Mandalorian”, a specially made live-
action “Star Wars” spin-off.
For $6.99 a month—slightly less than
the cost of a cinema ticket—viewers in
America, Canada and the Netherlands can
now tap the world’s most valuable enter-
tainment catalogue. As well as new original
content, they can watch anything from
“Snow White” to “Avengers: Endgame” and,
thanks to Disney’s $71bn acquisition this
year of 21st Century Fox, all 662 episodes of
“The Simpsons” (America’s favourite car-
toon family was also enlisted in the adblitz). Behind the scenes, a new recom-
mendation algorithm hoovered up enough
user data in a few hours to start sending
millions of personalised viewing sugges-
tions, says Kevin Mayer, who runs Disney’s
international and direct-to-consumer
businesses, including Disney+.
Going into on-demand streaming is an
epochal shift for the 96-year-old company.
Like its Hollywood rivals, it has built an
empire on controlling access to films and
tv shows, which were released in dribs and
drabs—on cinema screens, broadcast net-
works and cable channels. That model, the
entertainment industry has concluded, is
no longer viable in the internet age. In Oc-
tober at&t, which owns WarnerMedia, the
former Time Warner, unveiled hboMax.
The new service will give viewers full on-
line access to hbo programming, as well as
to other valuable content including the li-
braries of Warner Bros, New Line Cinema
and Japan’s Studio Ghibli, plus new origi-
nal shows. nbcUniversal will parry with
Peacock, a mainly ad-supported streaming
platform also expected next year. Smaller
services such as cbsAll Access and Show-time have already piled in. On November
1st Apple, a tech giant with entertainment
aspirations, launched Apple tv+, its own
streaming service with several star-stud-
ded original shows.
“We are surprised it took them all so
long,” quips Ted Sarandos, chief content of-
ficer of Netflix, which began the streaming
revolution in 2007. But now they are here.
It is, in the words of Brian Roberts, chief ex-
ecutive of Comcast, a cable behemoth
which owns nbcUniversal, “an important
moment, as many parties across broad in-
dustries have entered the competition for
content creation”.
That competition should benefit con-
sumers, who can expect a surfeit of high-
quality fare. For media companies and
their shareholders, it will be brutal. Bil-
lions of dollars will get torched. Some end-
ings will be happier than others.The big bang theory
The entertainment business’s original
script was simple. People paid for cinema
tickets (and later video rentals) to watch
films, and advertisers paid networks for ac-
cess to viewers of their tv shows. That be-
gan to change in the 1990s. Hit series like
“The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” on
hbo, a cable channel then owned by Time
Warner, proved that people would pay ex-
tra for compelling television. But hbostill
relied on “sequential” releases of weekly
episodes. It was also a wholesale proposi-
tion, sold in a bundle of pay-tvchannels.
“The big bang”, says Barry Diller, chairmanPower to the people
LOS ANGELES
Media giants are battling for viewers’ attention. There will be bloodBriefing The future of entertainment