Disney+ Following Netflix

This morning my oldest daughter set all of the grandkids down to let them watch "Home Alone." Being lazy, I just logged into my Disney+ account and started the movie there. The kids enjoyed "Home Alone 2" last night and so it only seemed fitting to watch the first installment of the series today. I then headed out with my two sons for an entertaining morning activity. I didn't get a mile down the road before Disney+ decided to stop the movie and ask for a subscription verification. My daughter just found the movie on my Amazon Prime account and automatically charged me $4 so they could continue the movie. I am a little miffed as I do own a copy of the movie and now have to pay to watch it again. I'm not mad at my daughter though as it is only $4.

The reason Disney+ kicked my daughter off is because they are following Netflix and cracking down on multi-home account usage. I actually don't have my own Disney+ account and have been piggybacking on my son's. At the time I started doing that, Disney said it was perfectly fine for up to 8 accounts regardless of household. Now it seems they realize that is why the streaming video service continues to lose money.

If you are sharing a Disney+ account with someone else and all of a sudden discover you no longer have access, now you know why. I'm not sure if I will sign up for my own account as my wife and I don't watch a lot of television on our own. I will have to look at how often my grandkids are here and see if it warrants getting an account. Until then, I'll utilize the other 2 video streaming services I get for free: Amazon Prime and Netflix, thanks to my T-Mobile account.

Daytime Television Blows

Last night I got a nasty case of the stomach flu. I woke up every 90 minutes to empty my stomach contents. Fortunately towards the end of the night, my stomach would cramp up, waking me, but I didn't need to go pray to the porcelain god. I think my body recognized I didn't have anything else to expel. I ended up staying in bed until 8am, which is late considering I usually get up at 6am. When I finally did wake up, I didn't feel like doing anything and so I turned on the television to see what I could find on broadcast TV. From the title of this post you can tell I came away disappointed.

When all of the streaming services became ubiquitous, I cancelled my cable subscription and increased my Internet speed. Now I really only use broadcast television to watch the nightly news every evening. Being too lazy to look for something to watch online, I cycled through the normal TV channels. Some of them had local news shows and others had national morning news shows. None of them interested me. I looked at a few of the public broadcasting networks and again came away disappointed. Ultimately after 30 minutes I turned off the TV and headed to my office to read e-mail.

I did the bare minimum e-mail for work and attended an hour-long meeting that got shortened to 15 minutes when I explained I spent the night with the stomach flu. Then I headed to my TV room to watch what I wanted in the comfort of my soft-padded-leather couches. While I could watch shows coming over the airwaves, I also had all of my streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and even YouTube. I entertained myself while eating a very soft and bland breakfast without the hassle of channel surfing. After about an hour and seeing that all the food I ate stayed down, I ate some grapes and yogurt as my energy is low and my stomach empty.

I have not really watched daytime-broadcast TV in about a decade and I have to say I haven't missed much. It is filled with the same programming I used to hate when I stayed home from school because of illness. Fortunately we have many more entertainment options and are not stuck watching VHS video tapes with their lousy 320x240-pixel resolution. Technology really does make being sick easier to deal with.

Bad Christmas Movies

There does not seem to be an end to bad Christmas movies on all of the various streaming services. In an effort to break away from the traditional Christmas movies, I have tried expanding what I am watching this Season. Unfortunately you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a good movie. For the record, these are the Holiday movies worth watching and where you can find them:

• It's a Wonderful Life on Amazon Prime
• The Santa Clause on Disney+
• The Santa Clause 2 on Disney+
• Home Alone on Disney+
• Home Alone 2 on Disney+
• White Christmas on NetFlix
• A Christmas Story on several different streaming services including Amazon Prime
• I'll be Home for Christmas on Disney+
• Miracle on 34th Street (both versions are good) on Disney+
• A Christmas Carol on on Amazon Prime
  

I would publish a list of movies to avoid but it is a long one. Please let me know in the comments below if you have found a good movie I should add to my list. Also, there are a lot of movies that take place during Christmas but that doesn't make them Christmas movies. Die Hard is not a Christmas movie!

Content is King

The new video streaming service "Disney+" recently launched. This afternoon I looked at Disney's stock price and it rose $10/share. Coincidentally I looked at Netflix stock and it dropped $10/share over the same period. You have to wonder if there is a correlation.

I currently don't have any streaming video subscriptions nor do I plan to sign up for any but I have to admit that if I did, I would start with Disney+. Why? They have the most content I am interested in watching. If you look at my movie collection at home, I have a ton of Disney movies. Not just the animated ones but also most of the Marvel and Star Wars collections.

So what is Netflix going to do? Well I have to recognize that Netflix is fairly nimble and has done a great job at adjusting their business strategy based on market changes. I think they will be able to come up with content through their own efforts or through acquisition. There should be a lot of companies merging content in the near future because it doesn't make sense to subscribe to CBS's streaming service and then pay more money for NBC's or a number of other smaller providers.

Today at the office we had a discussion about who is signing up for Disney+ and if they are ditching another streaming video service. Everyone that is signing up for the new service is cancelling something. My own son sent me a message saying that he was getting rid of Netflix for Disney+.

I will be interested to see how Disney+ changes the video streaming market and hope that is spurs collaboration among the smaller players. That is probably the only way some of them will survive.

Election Night Alternatives

Halloween is one of those nights that children look forward to weeks before it happens. So is Christmas Eve. Tonight is the opposite. I will be so glad when this evening is over. I am tired of watching all of those political commercials or listening to them on the radio. One will be for a proposition or candidate while the next one will be against the previous ad. Recently there was a story about a young girl crying because of all the name calling. I can sympathize.

My trick for getting through this evening is to not turn on the TV. That is why I am on my computer adding to my blog. Later I will be doing other things on the Internet. There are a number of wholesome and worthwhile activities to be found there. If I was at the office, playing online video games would be a great start. As I am on my boat and don't have my gaming console, I will opt for something else.

I could watch a movie on Hulu or NetFlix, but my Internet connection is shared among a number of other boats and can be slow at times. This causes pauses in a streaming video and can be rather tedious. This evening I am going to do some software development. Previously I mentioned I am working on a new game and so I will work on that. That would be a better use of my time anyways.

One Child, One Computer

I must confess that we are headed into the best time of the year. Football season is about to start. Ski stores have started gearing up for their preseason sales. Of course, let's not forget that school is just around the corner. Last year at this time, I mentioned that now is the time to start getting your computer ready for those kids in your house. I second my recommendations from last year and encourage you to make sure you have plenty of ink/toner for your printer and that your word processing software is up-to-date.

This year I only have one child at home using the family computer. That makes it effectively his own computer. My son knows better than to ask to put the computer in his room as we have a rule about that in the house. Good parents understand the dangers of allowing children, that is anyone under the age of 18, to keep computers in their rooms. While there is a lot of useful information on the Internet, there is also a lot that can harm your children as well. Even my college-age kids are encouraged to use their computers in the family room as opposed to their bedrooms.

My oldest daughter's laptop needs a new battery and so she wasn't able to fully comply with the laptop-in-the-family-room rule. That was not good for her this summer as she was constantly staying up late and watching Netflix into the wee hours of the morning. As she is 23, it didn't really bother me, but I use her as an example to other parents to show that pornography is not the only problem caused by computers in the bedroom. Luckily my daughter is wise and cancelled her Netflix subscription before heading off to school. She doesn't need anything else competing with her study time.

Free Content - Part 2

My last posting provided a little history about how we went from software pirates to music pirates and now to movie pirates. Congress has proposed legislation to help curb this piracy, but is has been put on hold for the time being. This brings up the question: Is legislation the answer? In a nutshell, no.

If you look at the software and music industries, enacting new laws didn't really help. A combination of enforcing existing laws coupled with simple technological advances like software licensing keys had the largest success for the software industry. As for music, piracy just went underground. The same will happen with movies.

Talking with one of my co-workers exposed a mindset of the younger generation that was new to me. He expressed that teenagers and young adults expect certain things to be free. If you look at the software industry, open source is a large movement that gains more and more projects every day. The same thing is happening with music. If you look at iTunes, they constantly have the free song of the week. There are also bands that make their music freely available from their websites. One would think this would kill innovation. I personally believe it has the opposite effect. If you are a commercial software company and put out a sub-standard product, there is an open source project that your customers can replace you with. That means your product had better be good enough that people will pay money for it. I see the same thing happening with music.

So what is the solution for Hollywood? My suggestion would be to embrace the Internet and don't try to litigate or legislate it. Use it as a new medium for distributing your products. While fewer people are interested in actually buying DVDs, more people are interested in streaming movies from places like Netflix. Think about it. If you don't have to create a DVD and ship it somewhere, you shouldn't have to charge nearly as much, but still be able to make the same amount of profit.

Unfortunately movies are not the end of free content. Today I saw a prototype of a new electronics device created on a 3D printer. It is only a matter of time before you will be able to download plans from the Internet and create your own Ferrari. Let's see Congress try to figure out how to legislate that one.