0/5

Disney+ to add Star in February

More adult skewing content coming within Disney+ -but so is a price lift.

Disney will add general entertainment streaming service with adult-skewing content from the company’s ABC, FX, Freeform, Searchlight, and 20th Century Studios brands.

The service will be housed within its Disney+ platform in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore from February 23, 2021, with a price lift to $11.99/month or $119.99/annual.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek said, “In terms of the general entertainment offering internationally, we want to mirror our successful Disney Plus strategy by using our Disney Plus technical platform, bringing in content we already own and distributing it under a successful international brand that we also already own, which is, of course, Star.”

Star will not launch in the US where Hulu already covers such content.

Source: Deadline

24 Responses

  1. Will be interested to see what programming we get from this but how come you can’t have more adult Disney products eg new Lizzy McGuire or Love, Victor but you can have a whole adult section via Star?

    1. Doubt it as there would already be an agreement in place for Handmaid’s Tale to be on SBS. Just like how The Good Fight still airs on SBS and not 10 All Access / Paramount +.

  2. If we get General Hospital on Star/Disney+ I’ll be one happy camper! Vintage General Hospital, All My Children and One Life to Live might be a tad too much to hope for.

    1. Assuming by “all these streaming services” you were going with Netflix, Stan, Amazon, Binge, Kayo and Disney+ you’d be looking at around $85 a month. But you’re better off just subscribing to the services you’ll actually use that month as opposed to having all of them at the same time.

      1. All these streaming subscriptions together with Dolby Vision are still better value than having a single Foxtel subscription a few years ago, the only difference now is that you can swap and change content and manage your costs month by month, so thank you modern technology.
        Note: Audio-visual improvements will be introduced in the near future including H.264 codec (VVC) for 8K video streaming.

        1. a) I’m assuming your talking about H.266? H.264 (VVC) isn’t a thing and 264 in no way could do 8K. it was only just ratified earlier this year – it will be years away.
          b) 8K of what content? – we are still struggling to get broadcast quality 4K content and no one (out side of tests in Japan) does any 8k broadcasting.

  3. Really hoping this means we’ll get The Bachelor and Bachelorette US as Nine Life has screened them for years. Ditto American Idol, as I can’t feel confident Nine will screen it again – it seemed like COVID filler which we might not need in 2021. I need my fix of all these shows!

  4. So this might be why we haven’t seen Love, Victor in Aus yet… amongst other shows of course… this is news that pleases me deeply.
    Hopefully this means a Daredevil, Jessica Jones and/or Luke Cage TV continuation will go ahead and be able to stream here 😋

  5. I’ve always been confused by their argument that Hulu doesn’t have any international recognition and that’s why they went with Star. Star doesn’t have any international recognition outside of India/South East Asia? Probably not using Hulu so they don’t drive the value up when they buy Comcast out of their stake.

    1. Can’t hulu because media giant comcast still has a stake in it, their agreement with comcast is that they will purchase remaining comcast share in hulu at market value in 2024. So if they launch hulu in international markets, the market value of hulu will increase and they will have to pay more to comcast just to acquire the rest of its share. so i wouldnt expect any aggressive hulu expansions until then but probably wont be required as star is hulu outside of US now.

  6. Any word on how this will affect current catalogues of existing streamers who currently host some of this content? Will they be shared between services until current contracts expire, or will Disney have bought some properties out to exclusively stream them? Though not mentioned in the opening paragraph, I’m expecting it would be Disney’s preference for Star to be the home of Hulu content too – but many existing Hulu series are currently distributed through Stan.

    Or is this likely to resolve similarly to 10All Access, where Good Fight remains on SBS, and Star Trek Discovery remains on Netflix, and Picard was sold to Amazon?
    Bet many Handmaids Tale fans would be disappointed to see it disappear from SBS.

    Perhaps traditional international distribution sales for certain series are still weighed up as more lucrative than using them as tent poles for a peripheral streaming service…

    1. Don’t think there’s much (or any) Disney-proper content on rival paid streamers, following Disney+ launch a year ago (Stan did have it but immediately lost all family friendly content and kept mature content for a while but have now lost that).

      But yes, all the 20C Fox, etc stuff… Might be tricky.

      Also wonder if it’ll affect Seven’s current contract with 20C Fox in any way (including 7Plus – Ally McBeal just landed for example) as well as any old lapsing Disney/ABC contracts?

      1. Perhaps all Disney/Fox films have left Stan but I just had a look at Stan and there are still a fair few Disney owned ABC studios/Fox series eg Family Guy, Greys Anatomy, Buffy, How I Met Your Mother, Scrubs, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, Revenge etc plus 9Now have complete series of Desperate Housewives and Malcolm in the Middle for example so I’m assuming as you say, that Nine/Stan will lose these soon, but for the time being they are still there. Search “Disney” in Stan and they all show up.

  7. I wonder if the powers that be take Into account the prices of the service, if you want you can really only afford a couple of services. I tried Stan, and Britbox, and Binge and really for what I want Amazon Prime and Netflix programmes are all that I have time to watch, with Prime being the most used with some of the best Australian shows that I have not seen for years. It is about time that you, can have a service that will make it easier for you to watch anything you want from anyone, I know that it is not likely to happen as everyone is protecting their content, as they say content is king. It would be great for us the consumer.

  8. Disney (Touchstone Pictures’) “Flightplan” (2005 airplane thriller with Jodie Foster) was just on TV last night, 7flix. A good if underrated and silly-ish movie.

    Can see such mature Disney content (they’ll have loads of such shows/movies especially from the 20C Fox library) catering for a different audience, more along the lines of say Stan, those who might not be very young-skewing a la Disney+ proper. They either might not go for children’s/family at all or only occasionally, whether it be they share it (have children themselves) or go a subscription just for Star.

    So can see Star, might take a while to find success, working for Disney.

Leave a Reply