Disney launched the ‘Movies Anywhere’ service on Wednesday. The company announcement came as a result of the effort along with five major Hollywood studios.
Disney has been trying to compete with digital services for a while now, and ‘Movies Anywhere’ comes as the final jab to that.
Five major Hollywood studios’ catalog in Disney’s service
Disney joined with five Hollywood film studios to offer a new service. It’s designed to make it easier for consumers to collect digital movies that they can watch anywhere.
“Movies Anywhere is for everyone. There is a movie lover in all of us,” said Karin Gilford, general manager of ‘Movies Anywhere’ on Wednesday.
“We’ll launch with a catalog of almost 7,500 titles from our five partner studios.”
“Consumers will have access to all of those and when they connect their accounts they’ll get to have that library with them wherever they go. From family to film buffs, movie fans will find value in ‘Movies Anywhere,'” added Gilford.
The service was developed by Walt Disney to provide a single app and website where customers can find movies they have purchased from a variety of retailers.
‘Movies Anywhere’ catalog has movies from the following studios Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
In recent years, Hollywood movie studios have been looking for ways to encourage digital sales of movies since they leave theaters in order to help make up for the decline in popularity of physical DVDs.
In the same way, Disney has been trying to encourage different ways of creating and distributing content.
‘Movies Anywhere’ is available on Amazon Fire devices, Apple TV, iOS devices, Android TV, Android devices, Roku devices, and web browsers.
Cutting off ABC employees
As part of a long-anticipated restructuring and reallocation of resources at the Walt Disney Company’s in the Disney/ABC Television Group has begun laying off employees.
According to reports, the company began notifying affected employees Thursday morning.
The restructuring will reportedly affect lower than the 10% workforce. Contrary to what had been speculated when news broke of the layoff plan weeks ago.
The impact is expected to be minimal on production and programming. The majority of jobs being eliminated hail from non-content related or operational sectors
The group’s entertainment units affected include ABC Entertainment ABC Studios, Disney Channel, DisneyXD, Disney Junior, and Freeform.
The move comes as a cost-cutting measure as Disney shifts toward newer forms of content distribution, such as digital, and greater automation in some operational areas.
Source: The Verge