Well, we didn’t have this on our Monday morning bingo card. According to a comment from Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy, Disney said that “Streaming is dead”. Context is important here.
Gilroy was at the ATX Television Festival on Thursday last week for a feature panel on Andor. The panel discussed the adult themes and the contemporary feeling politics in the show. They also covered how Andor referenced sex, suicide, media control and manipulation, the dirty side of espionage, and even genocide.
He said he didn’t take a single note from Disney or Lucasfilm, and they gave him all the freedom he needed to make the show how he wanted to make it.
The only disagreement they had, according to him, was about money. This is where the comment came up.
“I mean, [for] Disney this is $650 million. For 24 episodes, I never took a note. We said ‘Fuck the Empire’ in the first season, and they said, ‘Can you please not do that?’. In Season 2, they said, ‘Streaming is dead, we don’t have the money we had before,’ so we fought hard about money, but they never cleaned anything up. That [freedom] comes with responsibilities.”
Interesting comment. Disney+ showed a stratospheric rise, like many new streamers do. Then the COVID boost lifted all providers as people all over the world stayed at indoors and were restricted, and had a voracious appetite for home entertainment.
Then, inevitably, the growth stalled. The cost of living crisis hit, and families started to take a long, hard look at their budgets. Multiple television providers were always likely to find themselves in the “luxury” column on any household spreadsheet.
When running multiple streamers starts to beat the cost of premium cable or satellite per month, something is going to give. Against this is a backdrop of jailbroken Firesticks, KODI builds, IPTV proliferation, and the grid coordinates of a certain bay becoming well-known and openly discussed, all of which further drive down subscriber numbers.
However, for Disney to be quoted as saying “streaming is dead” and confirming that they simply don’t have those levels of cash anymore, is jarring.
Is the end of the streaming wars in sight? We have long predicted that consolidation is the only way forward for some of these platforms.
