Do you consider merchandise revenue or how this affects the attractiveness of Disney+ in a crowded streaming market in your calculations?
Merchandising revenue shows up in the companies bottom line so definitely (although when it comes to stuff sold at the parks I’m skeptical that you can assign all of that revenue to the IP associated with that revenue as people going to the parks are generally going to buy merchandise of some kind). Disney+ is as of right now the biggest mistake Disney corporate has ever made. I think not only will Disney+ not be profitable for the company as a whole I think it’s an example of a company slitting its own throat to chase a fad over protecting the literal golden goose that was cable television. They own ESPN ffs.
All of that content should have been sold for competitive market rates to other streamers. Hulu was just a backup plan and they honestly should have just let that gently expire without access to the catalog as soon as they understood the honestly garbage economics behind streaming… which they absolutely should have because they owned a huge chunk of Hulu.
I think the only reason Disney got into streaming in the first place was that Netflix was getting a crazy valuation and they didn’t want to get left behind. For the underlying business there was absolutely nothing appealing about the streaming model and Disney should have only ever been a seller in that marketplace. There was an opportunity to lease content to streaming platforms for vastly more than those streaming platforms could recoup. Instead Disney decided to add even more competition to the streaming market and forgo all/most of that IP money.
Honestly the whole Disney+ fiasco really is another exceptional example of braindead MBA’s making 9 figures to trade on their exit date instead of actually running the business in a competent way.
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This worked and was really easy to setup. Thanks!
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I’ve been making a similar argument about Disney+ for a few years at least. They’re more than 50% off their peak, still trading at 36x earnings, and afaik Disney+ has only managed a profitable quarter but not a profitable year.
They have like 110M subscribers in the US and Canada out of like 145M households. Are they seriously going to be able to penetrate further than that? A lot of people have it free through a cell phone provider promotion and such. So they need people to go from free to paid and/or take a price hike in stride. And they need that to add as much as they lost in movie revenue and that’s just to get back to where they were before all this.
There are markets outside of North America.
When someone falls for a cyber scam, once the money is sent in Bitcoin it’s a wrap right?
Even if Disney+ becomes a profitable part of the business there’s no universe where it makes anything close to what Disney should be making off cable + theaters + selling content to networks and streamers. Complete and utter disaster even if it eventually turns a small profit. If you think Disney+ is going to generate the kinds of profits Disney was making off theatrical releases and cable carriage fees… you’re going to be disappointed that’s never happening. Ever.
The only reason they got into streaming was to say they were in streaming and not miss out on that sweet sweet streamer multiple during the streaming bubble era. Textbook IBGYBG behavior.
Nothing’s keeping them from releasing their movies in theaters.
Unless it’s a shitload of money and the scammers are dumb or lazy, then yeah.
I saw an article recently that in a rare instance, someone scammed in bitcoin got most of their funds recovered because the scammers moved it onto an exchange (like Coinbase or similar) where the feds could freeze + return it. But that’s the level of intervention it takes to have any hope of recovery, generally.
Yeah it’s a shitload of money to my parents, but $30K isn’t moving the needle for the FBI or whatever.
That sucks man, sorry to hear.
If you’re comfortable on giving more details on how the scam worked, it could be helpful for us who have older parents who may be susceptible to these scams as well.
I don’t know much about it but if whoever did the scam is sitting on a lot of crypto seems possible it could get seized at some point so I would think worth going through all the reporting/etc?
So, I got a call from my parents’ area code from a number I didn’t recognize, so I didn’t answer. Voicemail is a weird message from my father that has almost no emotion in the voice, making me suspicious it’s an AI spoof. But he says that he was hacked, and he is working with his bank’s fraud department to fix it, and he’s not allowed to tell anyone or even allowed to talk to me at all, so he’s calling me from his friend’s house to let me know I won’t be able to reach him or my mother for a couple weeks, and he’s considering buying a Tracfone so he can make calls without being traced.
So I lookup the phone number he called from to make sure it matches the friend in question, and it does. I call him immediately, hoping it’s not too late. He tells me that his computer stopped working, and then he got a call from Microsoft telling him that he’d been hacked and helping him try to fix it. They told him that it likely involved fraud from the bank, and they had him call his bank’s fraud department (my assumption is that he got confused relaying this and they “transferred him” to the bank’s fraud department which is what I’ve read about in these scams before).
They showed him his bank account with a near zero balance instead of $30K or whatever. (My assumption is they got him to share his screen and got him to log into the bank account, then photoshopped it and shared it back with him.)
They told him that they would put the money back in while they were trying to catch the person doing it, who they believed worked for the bank. They then showed him the account with the full balance again. They told him to go to the bank, not tell anyone what was going on because someone in the bank was probably in on it, and told him to withdraw all the money and put it in bitcoin. I asked him why in the world they would do that, and he said they told him it wasn’t his money it was theirs, and they were giving it to him while they tried to recover his money - and the safest place to put it was in bitcoin.
So they sent him to a vape shop or something with a crypto ATM or kiosk, and he deposited the money. I asked him what he deposited it into, and he said it was just his machine, his account. I said what account, did you create an account? He said no, he just put the money in. I asked how he sent it or where it went, he kept saying the machine. I asked him how he logged into the machine or what info he put in, he said they had him scan a QR code they sent him.
So at that point I told him this was a scam and he needed to go to the bank and ask them which law enforcement entity to call. He said he couldn’t go to the bank because they were in on it. I told him that he didn’t speak to anyone from the bank, he spoke to a scammer. He said no it was the fraud department. Lots of back and forth on this, I had to keep saying over and over “I am 100% sure this was a scam, I’ve read about these scams, you need to go to the bank and the police.”
Finally he relented and I told him it was fine to speak to me or my mom on his phone, but not to talk to any strangers without hanging up and looking up the right number. I told him to go to the bank, ask for the manager, tell them he was a victim of a cyberscam, explain what happened, and ask for the next steps and which law enforcement entity. My thought here was the local police are going to be ~worthless, the only chance (and it’s super small) of getting the money back was through the FBI, and the bank might have a direct line for this type of thing.
He called me back 5 minutes later from his friend’s phone and sounded confused and said he had a question but he forgot the question, and asked if he was allowed to use his phone to call me and I said yes.
Bank set up a new account for him and told him the money is gone and never coming back, and gave him a bunch of information to give the police and they classified it as elder abuse. State police sent him to the county police. He’s there now.
This is a man who has never walked around with more than a few thousand dollars in cash in his life, and even that was as treasurer of his bowling league depositing the league dues or whatever. He’s never done anything involving any crypto ever. And he’s never smoked anything ever. And somehow, he ends up taking $30K in cash and depositing it into a Bitcoin ATM in a smoke shop.
Unfortunately, this was 100% of my parents’ liquidity and probably between 30% and 50% of their net worth. So it’s pretty catastrophic for them.
Also, I have warned my father about scams like this at least three separate times, right down to people calling him instead of him calling them, telling him to do stuff with money, or asking him for account info. I also told him anyone telling him not to speak to his family and not to tell anyone what was going on was a huge red flag of a scam. Most recent was maybe two months ago. My wife warned him about it randomly in a conversation a week ago.
He’s 75, but had been pretty cognitively sharp (at least relative to his baseline) up until maybe a year ago, then started showing general signs of minor memory issues (losing keys, losing his glasses but they’re hanging from his shirt, losing his cell phone, repeating the same old story every few months… nothing unusual for his age, or indicating any major drop off). A few months ago, the same. No major issues. Then when they flew out to visit us, it was a disaster on both trips through airport security despite careful directions and as much help as we could give them, and I realized he definitely wasn’t as sharp anymore. He also fell for the Haitian cats and dogs thing, but he’s brainwashed by Fox News so I wrote that off.
Anyway, moral of the story is, cognitive decline can happen gradually, but it can also happen in a fucking hurry, and warning your parents isn’t necessarily enough to make a difference. Ultimately I think this was unavoidable, as attempts to give my father financial advice to avoid brokerage fees recently was not well received at all so I don’t think I could have taken over their finances or helped shield them. But my advice would be take over your elderly family’s finances sooner than you think is necessary if possible, and if you can’t do that, minimize the amount they have at any one institution. They drained both checking and savings accounts at the same bank. It probably would have been a lot harder to pull off the same amount of money across two or three institutions. Also frequently remind them that they can always call you to ask you questions about anything, no matter what anybody tells them.
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The reporting is going through the county police, which tells me that this shit is happening a TON and nobody is doing anything serious to stop it. Because I’m pretty confident the county police do not have the capabilities to chase this down.
Realistically, it should be impossible for someone in their 70s to walk in, liquidate their accounts, go to a crypto ATM and deposit all of it using a QR code they were given. Banks should be required to caution people against scams when they try to liquidate an account for a large sum of money, ideally with a letter on like FBI or DOJ letterhead. Something old people would trust that describes these types of scams in some detail.
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No advice, but god that fucking sucks. The world is full of ridiculously complex scams targeting the elderly and society is doing jack shit to stop them.
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Thanks, would love if anyone had any advice but I doubt there’s any. Like 99.99999999% that money is gone, 0.000% the county cops are tracking it down. Going to have to try to convince them to turn over control over their finances or like make me a joint accountholder and require my approval for anything over a certain amount, but beyond that, not much we can do.
Sorry to hear about your dad getting scammed. There is a YouTuber youtube.com/@KitbogaShow who makes videos messing with these scammers. Maybe you could try to reach out to him. He might be able to give advice about the best course of action.
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In addition to what you said before about them voluntarily letting you manage/hold assets if concern they have dementia/Alzheimers/etc can potentially go through a legal process to get guardianship over these things even if they not cooperative (although this doesn’t seem like the case)
Checking him out, from what I’ve seen so far there is no course of action, but I’ll see what he has said about it.