On Thursday, Disney announced a few new additions coming to Disney+. Unfortunately, it’s not about adding missing parts of its library, such as most of the classic Disney animated shorts, or numerous TV shows from the 2000s (“House of Mouse,” “Teamo Supremo,” “Dave the Barbarian,” etc.). Instead, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced during an earnings conference call the streaming service is getting games (via an agreement with Epic Games) and… user-created generative AI short form content. In other words, users will be able to use Disney+ and AI to create their own short videos with Disney’s characters, as well as watch such.
There’s already problems with YouTube and other platforms being flooded with AI slop using old characters in inappropriate ways. But the fact Disney’s decided that the only thing wrong with that is that they weren’t the ones directly profiting is disappointing. And speaking of inappropriate, what happens when (not if) someone uses “Frozen”’s Elsa, Spider-Man, or Mickey Mouse in some way that’s offensive? This is on top of AI’s other flaws, plus the fact that Disney is a major animation studio, and a reason why people are paying for Disney+ in the first place.
Given the announcement’s details are vague, I wonder if it’s just meant to mollify Wall Street, which is still all in on AI, despite that it’s clearly a bubble about to burst at some point. Never mind, as Engadget notes, Disney’s highly protective of their IP; the company partly responsible for our ludicrous 95-year-long copyright terms won’t be pleased about AI’s muddled copyright state. Finally, if Disney does go through with this, I wonder if this means Warner Bros., Paramount, or Comcast will also want such for their own streaming services and properties.
Backlash to Disney+-with-AI
Needless to say, online response to this is (from my perusal) universally negative, at least within animation circles. Most noteworthy is the response by Dana Terrace, the creator of Disney’s “The Owl House,” who urges viewers to cancel Disney+ and watch her show through “other” means.
I note all of this comes on the heels of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, Disney+ price hikes, and a resolved-as-of-yesterday dispute with Google over YouTube TV. None of this makes Disney look good, even by modern conglomerate standards.
Fortunately, as I’ve written before, much of Disney’s library is available on DVD and Blu-ray, so there’s alternatives to paying for Disney+ and Hulu. That said, Disney is notorious for not releasing their TV cartoons to DVD/Blu-ray—and that includes “The Owl House.” The only legal options for that and other such shows are: pay for Disney+ forever, buy the (DRM-locked) digital copies from iTunes or Amazon, or make do with the handful of free episodes on Disney’s YouTube channel. For the second option, Amazon charges a total of $97.45 for all three seasons of “The Owl House.” For the third option, only the very first episode, one second season episode, and the entire third season are available on YouTube. Not exactly viewer-friendly ways to actually own the show.
On a non-AI note, Disney+ now has 131.6 million subscribers (up by 3.8 million from the last business quarter; guess the Jimmy Kimmel incident didn’t hurt business). Hulu has 64.1 million subscribers (up by 9 million from the last quarter). This is also likely the last time Disney will give quarterly reports of subscriber numbers, as they plan to pull a Netflix and not report such going forward.
Photo by Marques Kaspbrak on Unsplash
