Slopping the Trough: Disney Plus Loses Billions and the Decline of Physical Media in America
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Disney Plus has lost money. A lot of money.
As of last year, Disney Plus’s losses clocked in at over $11 billion US dollars.
As subscriber losses pile up, they look to turn things around with incessant price hikes on existing customers.
Streaming media in general is just awful. It’s such a bad idea that they’re getting sick and tired of customers cancelling, and like me, just slowing accumulating a collection of DVDs and Blu Ray discs that don’t have ongoing costs once you own them, and which come with much higher quality sound and picture.
The market for new Blu Ray players is drying up considerably. I’ve been considering buying a new one as I’ve never really liked my Samsung from 2015 anyway and it’s starting to glitch occasionally. It just goes “rampant” and pops the movie out and blanks the screen, then it may do it again tomorrow, or not at all for another couple of weeks.
The price has collapsed on Ultra HD Blu Ray players, and while they’re falling out of favor in the mainstream market, regular Blu Ray players are being discontinued by LG and Sony, but new models continue to be produced by Panasonic and a few others.
LG says they may get back into the market “if demand picks up”, but for now the writing may be on the wall.
I think that someone will probably keep making these for a while due to enthusiasts in the market, but they’ve fallen out of the mainstream because of the widespread acceptance of low entertainment.
I figure that now may be a good time to upgrade my player. If nothing else, I’ll have a new player and a spare and will be able to play my movies for years.
The Streaming Model typically relies on “Slopping the Trough”.
Cory Doctorow apparently coined the term “enshittification”. Which is where something starts out good for the customer, then they make it horrible for the customer to make it good for advertisers and themselves, then they make it horrible for advertisers and the customers, to extract all the value for themselves.
In the context of streaming media, I use the term “slopping the trough” to refer to that third phase.
One reason I hate streaming, other than its ongoing expenses and price hikes, and ads, is that the “content” usually just isn’t very good.
I was talking in Techrights a few days ago about the utter collapse in creativity, at least in the United States, in the last 10 years. It had been in decline for years, but it’s like the rest of the country now, nobody is putting effort into anything at all anymore.
The food is getting worse, the entertainment is getting worse, not that these are our biggest problems. But when you can’t even tune out of all of the nonsense that’s going on in public life and just be a hermit with a closet full of movies, what can you do?
The streaming companies are focused on “quantity” to the exclusion of any and all QUALITY. Disney Plus has stuff coming to it all the time, but then nobody even remembers it a year later. They started a new Star Wars series and canceled it a few episodes in. What was the name of that? Who knows? I can’t even remember what happened or any of the character names. It wasn’t important.
Like everything they’re doing now, all it ever did was cost them money and they’re too stupid to even change course. They released another live action remake of one of their animated movies, Snow White, last month. It got a “splat” 40% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was a box office bomb.
Not that this is unusual for Disney’s live action remakes. When it came to The Lion King’s live action remake in 2019, Rotten Tomatoes was similarly unimpressed.
The Lion King 2019 is Disney at its worst, a soulless carbon copy of a vastly superior film that exists only to pander to nostalgia and reap financial benefit.
-Cory Woodroof (USA Today)
The talent that got Disney through its golden years is completely gone.
The only thing that they have left is “squeezing more juice” out of tired franchises that were done right 30 years ago. It almost feels like grave robbery at this point. Doesn’t it?
So what about home video markets?
Well, up until this point, if you wanted anything good, the answer was to have your own collection of curated titles on Blu Ray or DVD. Or you could “purchase” (You keep using that word, sir. I do not think you know what it means!) them from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, who knows who else.
The problem with said “purchases” are that they aren’t a “standard” and you don’t actually own them. You just pay the same price the Blu Ray costs, they don’t even give you a disc, and then it’s on someone’s “platform” that they get to dictate the hardware and software requirements for, before you get to watch it.
There are numerous problems with such an environment, and people already witnessed these problems 20 years ago thanks to Microsoft and their partnerships with VH1 and Walmart.
In the 2000s, there were not one, but two, digital music stores operated by Microsoft or at least using Microsoft DRM. Microsoft had their own which debuted with Windows Vista, called URGE, and they partnered with VH1 to sell Windows Media DRM encumbered files in the Windows Media Player.
Earlier yet, there was the Walmart Music Store, where you bought similar such files, and they shut down and abandoned their Microsoft Janus licensing server, and the files still worked, at least until you moved them to another computer and could no longer de-license the old computer and license the new one, wanted to put them on any portable music device and had the same problem, or upgraded from Windows XP. So there you were, marooned with nothing, after forking over valuable money.
In the Bible, Esau sold his birthright for a “mess of pottage”, and thanks to Microsoft. people who bought WM-DRM audio files got the same deal.
The story is basically that although he was full that night, soon after that he was hungry again, and his inheritance was gone.
Streaming is even more insidious. Because not only do you amass rights to watch movies you “purchase” but they depend on the future whims (or even existence) of the company you “purchased” them from. You also need a reliable internet connection at all times while playing the video, and if they say it’s time to chuck your computer or television even though it still works, then who are you to argue with them?
The reason why the “all you can eat buffet” options seem so bad is, well, they are!
If I subscribe to all of them, I’d be forking over more than $200 every month and I still wouldn’t have access to half the library of DVDs and Blu Ray discs that I already own.
They’ve succeeded in convincing people to give up something valuable for “basic cable” complete with advertising. And to part with valuable money so there’s nothing on.
They’ve still got it segmented into two markets. “Trough-Slopping”, and “Premium Purchases”, but the horror is that the stuff you want to keep will be “kept” where you don’t have an undeniable right to access it.
They’ve given up trying to convince people to go along with this, and now they’re getting ready to just stop making disc players and to tell you that streaming is the only game in town. How horrible!
I do not plan to go along with this. I plan to continue building a library of discs and keep my current disc player as a spare. I may even upgrade my TV so that I have a backup for that as well as one made to the latest standards that work for me.
They are taking the ports out of many of the TVs lately.
For many, it’s almost like an afterthought. Many of us like being able to use soundbars, shelf Hi-Fi systems, or in my case a Bose Wave Music System as a soundbar, and just hook it up over analog ports. They work fine. The sound is great. But these media companies have been wanting to close the “analog hole” for years.
This means either trapping you with puny TV speakers which can’t reproduce the actual sounds coming from the shows you’re watching, and blow out if you try to turn the volume up, or some degraded experience over Bluetooth using lossy codecs which may even revert to the baseline subband codec. Everyone knows that Bluetooth audio is typically horrible. It may work for a hands-free system in your car, but you can’t ask for much else from it.
For my part, I think that what the government and corporations are pushing for in this country is stupid, even for them.
While a country is failing, people may retreat into distractions for a while and not cause trouble. They call this “bread and circuses”. Societal instability is beginning to boil over, and it’s because many people don’t even have anything to satisfy their most basic needs.
The Republican Party is busy making sure there’s no bread (cutting off food and medicine from people, implementing tariffs that will ruin American consumer buying power in general), and the corporations are busy making sure that there’s no more “circuses” that the common man can enjoy, even if that’s retreating into his home and saying “I got a new movie on Blu Ray that I’ve wanted to see for years.”
We all know the way America is heading, into the dumpster. But even the entertainment options are no longer there. When I was a child, Disney certainly was not free, but it wasn’t unobtainable to the average family either. I think I recall my dad complaining that he spent a few hundred dollars to get us park tickets that week.
We stayed in a KOA “Kampground” [sic] and ran into a group of Germans that we ended up talking to and eating with every night.
I remember that trip pretty fondly. We drove down there, as was common back then. Plane tickets were just not something the average family used. It was typical to have plenty of time off work that you could add a few days of driving to the itinerary and use it as an excuse to see some of the country. Getting there was fun too. I remember being amazed by the Smoky Mountains. You’ll never get an experience like that while the TSA is giving you an anal probe at the airport while you spend over $3,000 flying down there and back and renting a car all week.
The entire trip probably didn’t even cost $3,000 in 1998, or if it did, just barely. Now it just about covers getting down there and back.
I know I’ll never see the world through anything other than my movie discs, because even my sister-in-law’s family, who makes over ten times more money than we do, had to take out a cash advance from their American Express card while they were in Singapore. If they can’t afford it, who can?
I’m at a point in my life where older age is setting in. I just want things to be simple and work well. I don’t really even much care for the technology used as long as it works.
I’ve been dealing with the lack of good modern media to stockpile DVDs and other entertainment, averaging as little as $1 per disc. Most of the best movies were made a long time ago and are all on disc. As long as you have a player that understands the format, you will always have access to that movie without having some streaming company feeding you the hook.
Recently I just ordered another 16 movies on Blu Ray from the Criterion collection. They’ve started remastering Godzilla. It occurred to me I’ve never actually seen most of them and the ones I did see were on cable with commercial breaks and bad editing and bad dubs over 30 years ago. I know if Criterion released them, they won’t be botched.
I’m also making my way through the collected works of Akira Kurosawa.
If I ever do end up on streaming, the most obvious choice for me would be the Criterion Channel because at least, although it shares all the other problems of streaming, it would be $99 a year to get access to their entire collection, and none of it is “slopping the trough”.
But I’d still like to just buy things one at a time and set them in a pile and say “I have that.” and I really do have that. If you consider the ten year cost, assuming no price hikes, of the Criterion Channel, you could own between 50-70 of their Blu Ray releases, and keep them. These disc formats work for a long time. I have CDs that are even older than I am and they still work. I have DVDs from the 90s that even still work.
I don’t even have to blindly buy discs, like you used to. By now, there’s plenty of consensus on which movies were great, good, meh, or garbage on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, and I can borrow from the library for free and prune it down to just the ones I know I want to own later.
But one format that does stop working is streaming. It stops working the minute you don’t subscribe to it again. If I binge everything that they have that I want to see and turn my attention elsewhere for a while, the subscription goes on. Even if I stop the subscription, if they do a new movie I want to see (just one), then I have to subscribe for an entire year just to see that. So even though their channel probably isn’t slop, it still represents a cursed object. Once you pick it up, you’re stuck with whatever they feel like doing to you.
I’m not interested in some “all you can eat buffet” full of whatever Netflix or Disney could slop us with. In fact, even when I buy DVDs for $1 each, there’s some I won’t touch because they’re not even worth $1 to me. They were pressing all kinds of things onto DVD, and not all if was good. But you also find gems.
When my Dad was a child he really got into reading. Not by choice, but because of constraints of technology in the 1950s and 60s. They had three channels back then, the same ones everyone in the country got, and they all had the same programming. So there was little reason to even have a TV. In fact, a lot of people didn’t have them.
Today, we have almost an unlimited amount of technology compared to the 1950s, and people choose to regress us to the point where there’s almost no reason to have it, by picking the worst and making it the “way things get done”.
Horrifically, Amazon is now refusing to sell Blu Ray players themselves. What’s left in stock is either Amazon Resale or third parties, and the supply is drying up elsewhere too, including at Walmart.
The home theater was one of the great inventions of the last century. Interestingly, Star Trek correctly predicted the fall of television. In TNG, Commander Data said that “That form of entertainment did not last much beyond the year 2040.”
At the rate these “streaming services” are going, they’ll have killed the market for premium home theater setups. What’s the point in even giving one space in your living room when there’s nothing of your own tastes being represented anymore?
This is even worse than the 90s, when I could just walk to the mall and go into Sam Goody or various others and there would always be something I wanted. And if there wasn’t, they’d help me order it.
Hayao Miyazaki (I have everything he did on Blu Ray.) recently saw an “AI animated” demonstration, and said he felt like it was the end of the world.
With “AI” slop, they look to do to animation what they’ve done to script writing.
They’ve taken the best people and fired them. They just want cheap shit to “slop the trough” with. You can look at something that a team of animators did at, say, Disney or Studio Ghibli, 30-40 years ago, lots of studios did hand-drawn animation, and many still do (at least in Japan), and it’s generally excellent. It’s half the reason to watch the show.
Then you can see the transition into CGI or “AI slop” and the quality goes down, a lot.
“AI” is like the Daleks, right? Daleks have no concept of elegance, and neither do these “AI” programs. They can only take a prompt and plagiarize based on what they’ve seen.
To train the model, these companies pretty much flagrantly commit daylight theft of the work of real artists, and then they get a slopbot that can make poor imitations. Then they started making “content” from it, and they realize that easily 90% of the people out there are stupid enough to keep spending their money on this crap, and so they keep pushing and you get more and more of it all the time.
When you throw garbage into a trough for pigs, it’s not going to be fine dining, it’s going to be the cheapest stuff you can possibly get. You throw sick and diseased animals into a blender, hell, maybe even other pigs. They don’t care. It’s pigs. It can be ‘The Silence of The Pigs‘, and then when the pigs go to crap it out, they’ll eat it again!
It represents modern culture, which says that if anything will involve a measure of work, you burn it down and walk away. So in a way, life imitates art, which imitates life.
Life in the United States must certainly be at a lower point than when Carter gave his “Malaise Speech” in the 70s economic slump.
Hardly anyone I’ve seen or talked to lately has any hope for the future. It’s more about distractions and limping along than it is anything else.
Aside from my movie nights and cooking, we don’t do a lot else. The landlord keeps coming back and rapaciously raising our rent, and I’m in a turf war with the neighbors across the hall, who are certifiably insane.
I get neighbors like this all around me, lately. One was beating her children and so loudly that I called the police because I did not know what else to do. Many blast their stereos. Most sit around all day and smoke drugs, and I told my doctor (when she asked if I use drugs), “No, and I keep 6 air purifiers running because of my neighbor’s drugs.”.
She and her medical assistant laughed. There was no joke. It was a statement of utter exasperation. Every day, the neighbors across the hall are fighting loudly. He keeps yelling at her. A few days ago it was for lying about looking for a job. They’re living in a studio apartment and he’s a military officer. 40-50 years ago they could have both lived comfortably on what he earned as a soldier. It makes me concerned that they’re not even paying our soldiers enough to live somewhere better and have a family.
Nobody I’ve seen lately respects boundaries. A large percentage have lost command of the language, or even a loose grasp of it. Nobody wants to know their neighbors because they’re afraid that if they knock on the wrong door, they’ll get shot.
This is not a happy, prosperous, or well educated country. It’s one that’s barely even getting by.
Why shouldn’t everything around us reflect that mindset I guess? It causes the mindset, and then it reflects it. The nightmare feeds into itself.
People can barely afford the basic necessities anymore. Gone are the days of a 88 cent tube of toothpaste. They’re all at least $5-6 at Walmart and behind locked glass.
In 1999, a 2 ounce trial size stick of deodorant could be found in the bin for 75 cents. Today, that’s almost what you get in a full stick, for $8.99. Behind locked glass.
Need to feed your baby? Terrific. You know those giant cans of formula your mom bought your brother in 1993 for $14? Try $66, for half that much, behind locked glass.
My cousin in Indiana had an unplanned pregnancy at 42, after the doctors said it was impossible. She was already broke. She had to find a woman who was lactating so much that her own baby couldn’t possibly go through it all and “bootleg” some breast milk.
It’s like some failing country or medieval times where you have to go find a wet nurse.
Walmart has to hire mercenaries to guard their stores here.
Literally. They now have at least 2 off duty cops and two security guards driving around the parking lot, to guard one store. Theft and lack of access to sufficient employment, and currency debasement, have left so many people so desperate that they have nothing left to lose.
The landlord where I live is filing evictions every month. He loses tenants sometimes to organized retail theft charges. About a year ago, he had to dismiss an eviction because a guy that kept not showing up for his criminal court appearances for stealing from Walmart, got ran over by another group of criminals in a stolen SUV.
I agree with Miyazaki. It feels like the end times.
I doubt Japan is “as bad”. They never let guns outnumber people. And they never had a President like Trump making sure to sign laws that ensure that people who are Certifiably Insane are armed well enough to invade Panama (which Trump is also threatening to do).
There are, of course, people who deny how bad things have gotten, like my mother, who says I’m imagining it all, but certainly most everyone has been knocked down a few pegs.
The people who were barely surviving are on the street. The people who were middle class are now barely getting by. There is no middle class. The rich, have never been richer. This is the result. Outside of a few gated communities, the whole damned country has gone to the dogs.
The government is always complaining that people don’t reproduce more, when even having children has become an unaffordable luxury expense. They don’t feed or educate the ones we have now, there’s clearly no jobs for them, so why do we need more?
In America, we used to live a life fit for human beings. I’m not exactly sure what this is, but as the somewhat popular saying goes, “this ain’t that”.
Dave Ramsey was promoting Donald Trump last year.
Now he’s joined in the chorus of telling people don’t even look at their retirement account and go to bread and water (or as he puts it, “beans and rice”), and to sell everything in their house to avoid bankruptcy.
I may swing by the pawn shop tomorrow to see if anything good has managed to float to the surface. █