Disney says once again that it is in the process of preparing for launch a Disney Kids TV streaming box, purely for family-friendly entertainment. Students of history have a habit of saying that history repeats itself, but in Disney’s case this amounts to it making the same mistakes over and over again.
In 2003 Disney came out with its Moviebeam idea, whereby it used spare broadcasting capacity to broadcast movies one bit at a time, to boxes in US homes – charging a few dollars a month, for 100 movies – all from Disney.
The same year it launched a similar service on a popular gaming engine for games which used Disney characters. And later that same year Buena Vista Home Entertainment, part of Disney said it would test disposable DVD technology which offered a 48 hour viewing window, for single views of its titles. All three services sank without trace, a matter of months after launch, which in some cases took years to launch. The problem was usually that they were far too expensive.
That same year 2003, Disney signed up for its Movies to go onto Movielink, for pay per view online consumption – it never raised so much as a pimple on Disney’s P&L in all the years that this relationship ran.
But having wasted over $100 million on Moviebeam, Disney came back for a second bite in 2005 in partnership with Nagra, producing a secure DVR which only downloaded Disney programming
Disney under new CEO David Iger has done a lot for Disney’s online presence, and signed many deals with broader services, eventually putting Disney content on Netflix, initially through Liberty Media’s Starz, and later directly, and cutting global TV channel deals around the world, and later in 2009 getting a stake in Hulu – but all the successes can be measured by a single rule – none of them involved creating a device to view purely Disney content. All the successes involved other expert, arms-length companies who separately understood and exploited various markets. Doing it the Disney way always defined all the failures.
But it always comes back to this same idea and in 2006 offered a flash based portable video player, inspired by Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs, a big Disney shareholder at the time, as the Disney equivalent of the iPod costing $100. It failed.
On at least two occasions Disney has tried to sell its own mobile phones through an MVNO. Where are those efforts now? Gone.
In 2008 on Iger’s watch Disney tried to bring out a series of Massively Multiplayer Online role playing Games built arounds its characters. Guess what? Failure. It has done better with the Marvel franchises it acquired.
In 2009 Disney came out with Keychest, a digital rights locker technology, but in that market, all the plaudits went to DECE (UltraViolet) and Apple’s iCloud and Keychet closed.
In 2010 Disney bought Playdom, a social gaming developer for $563 million and then 6 months later fired all the staff.
In 2013 UpLynk, the company eventually bought out by Verizon, was revealed as an OTT service purely for Disney. It’s not any more.
About the only thing technically in all that time which Disney did right, was to back Blu-ray and in business terms, to let Netflix cut a deal directly with it once its deal with Starz expired, as well as work with Alibaba to get deeper into China.
Disney plus its own service equals disaster and Iger by now should understand that he should just partner with as many routes to market as possible and keep making top content.
Instead he has endorsed this new Kids TV box, shown at CES, built by a company called Snakebyte – a Disney version of Roku or Chromecast for the same old magic price of $99. There will be Frozen and Avengers streaming versions and games, and games controllers. All in 4K. What makes it think it can get $99 when Roku charges $30.
Disney has already announced a different streaming box for its DisneyLife service in China. It is supposed to have plans for a separate ESPN live streaming service in the US too. Guess what? They will fail.