Star Life Talk and Gossip

Disney Developing New Pay Website

July 23, 2009 - 4:14 am 3 Comments

Disney already runs two websites that charge a monthly subscription fee: Club Penguin and Pixie Hollow. I don’t know how successful those enterprises are–though my son seems quite content with the free version of Club Penguin. I don’t personally know anyone who would pay for those activities when there are so many free sites with great games out there.

But now Disney is planning a new website, which will be expanded from the kids-only interests that its earlier two focus on. Disney CEO Bob Iger recently announced that the new subscription service would offer movies, TV shows, games, and other valuable services that viewers would find worthwhile enough to pay for.

Iger and Disney join a large community of entertainment entities who are watching their profits go online. It’s hard to make money online, but people are going there all the time–in some cases far more than they are turning to traditional media for their entertainment.

For example, we don’t have TV in our household, so Disney is missing out on what we would pay in cable subscriptions from the Disney channel. However, we do watch our favorite shows online, so my kids are still getting their fix of Hannah Montana andThe Wizards of Waverly Place. Apparently Disney has decide that’s not going to work for them.

Disney is leading the movement of entertainment groups who feel that people will pay for entertainment on the web. And sometimes that’s the case. We will, for example, pay Netflix a monthly fee to watch movies online and we’ll pay i-tunes a montly fee to have our favorite songs available for download.

But I watch The Office online every week during the regular season–should I have to pay a fee to get my episode? Isn’t that why there are so many advertisements for me to sit through? And NBC offers me character blogs, downloads, contests, games, and extra, completely free webisodes featuring supporting players that the paying cable customers never get to see.

So, I’m skeptical whether this new venture of Disney’s will work. It seems to me that as long as there’s good free stuff out there, there’s no reason to pay for it from someone else.

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