So it's finally happening

A small piece of news on the face of it but arguably the biggest industry-related news I've bothered to cover on this blog. This has, in fact, been a long time coming and I'm sure I've made several references and predictions along this line across many, many postings in the past.

But anyway, there's an announcement about a pick-up, a straight-to-order pick-up in fact (the last I've heard this happening with Disney was with Jessie, years and years before I even started this blog) with a new series called Diary of a Female President. No no, the "long time coming" thing isn't about a TV show about OOOoooooOOOoooooOOooHHHHHH female president! Virtue Signalling! SJW! #NotAllMen! and blah blah other ultra-right wing, I swear I'm not really a white supremacist neo-Nazi card-carrying member of the KKK I only use my membership on weekends! dreck that unfortunately has made society almost unlivable right now (and here I am contributing to it anyway) and as you know I'm pretty extreme leftist myself anyway. The title actually refers to a 12-year-old going into the 7th or 8th grade whose goal is to become President - by the sounds of it, think more Stuck in the Middle and yes it will be live-action (although I don't know yet if it will be single-cam ala Stuck in the Middle or Multi-Cam). 

No no, the long time coming is - it'll be an exclusive to Disney+. As in, that's the only place you will watch it. Which means you'll have to pay an additional subscription to Disney+ on top of whatever subscriptions you have - cable/satellite subscriptions of course, but even with more and more people cutting the cord they're trading that in only for yet more subscriptions with the rise of Netflix and Hulu competitors, copycats and wannabees. 

That brings in a lot of things that are...unique, shall we say, but things that could turn into problems. The first and most critical is access, and even that has multiple facets. For starters non-traditional TV subscriptions aren't near as universal as everybody wants to think and especially as Netflix and Hulu are trying to make people think with their press releases and news from such. I myself don't have any TV subscription beyond my cable package - although I plan on changing that at least sometime this year. But this has already created in effect a "ghettoization" of haves and have-nots, especially with dependents (i.e. children and teens). This is majorly assumptive on my part but I'm willing to guess white families and households are more likely to have a non-traditional TV subscription, and that white childless adults are the most likely demographic to not only adopt non-traditional subscriptions in the first place but cut the cord while they're at it.

Again, this is an assumption (and I suppose it's easy enough to just look up the facts) but there is basis in this assumption. I wrote in my big post two years ago about the failure of Girl Meets World and why very little of the nostalgia audience Disney was actually hoping to attract would tune in - it was mostly die-hard nostalgists and fans like Christian, Sean, Mike and myself who bothered to tune in supplimenting the most basic core of Disney Channel's basic core audience anyway. But Disney Channel was hoping to bring in more, much more - not only all the people who watched Boy Meets World but most critically their children.

The only problem was, those original fans didn't have children to begin with.

And now you have a large section of children from minority and/or PoC families and households - families where the adults barely have an idea of what even the hell Boy Meets World is because when they were growing up their families were too frickin' poor to even have one goddamned TV. And so Disney Channel failed to bring in that big nostalgia family audience, because by and large that audience never existed in the first place. I mean, in the most literal sense. The demographic itself is basically a work of fiction Disney Channel deluded themselves into thinking was an assumed and assured fact.

Anyway, I hope that illustrates the basic issue right there. Disney is betting a lot on Disney+ - even if they realize it or not. The fact that they've created Disney+ in the first place is a tacit admission traditional TV is dead, keeping extant through life support and cultural inertia if nothing else. But it's not enough to create a streaming service, or any guarantee of anything at all. The guarantee boat set sail a long time ago, as soon as Netflix and Hulu established themselves as firsts, and at this point everybody's just playing copycat correctly assuming that streaming is the way to go, but incorrectly assuming that people will actually give a shit about more than one or two streaming services, let alone dozens or even hundreds, all of which will of course charge monthly fees.

Are you going to pay for Netflix, and Hulu, and CBS All Access, and Disney+, and the other streaming service Viacom recently purchased, and whatever else comes along?

Which is why I'm predicting Netflix and Hulu will effectively become uber-networks in practice, providing shows from studios around the globe (exactly as they do now). But the implications for Nickelodeon and Disney Channel (even potentially the entire CBS and Disney empires) is that they may shrink to basically being "merely" studios - or even just go belly-up and cease to exist altogether. 

UPDATE: Actually more of a "I was in a hurry when I was writing this and I forgot to include these important details": For starters, Diary of a Female President is actually produced by CBS. CBS themselves shopped it to Disney Channel/Disney+ because they felt it more appropriate for there and with Viacom's streaming acquisition still in the works didn't feel like CBS All Access was a great place for kidcoms (that, and as dozens of outlets are reporting CBS All Access is effectively flatlining if not outright dying as I mentioned above). There's also some rumors that part of the deal is CBS stipulating DoaFP must absolutely be a streaming exclusive, for whatever reason.

None of this is necessarily unique, even in combination. Disney Channel's had non-It's A Laugh Productions before (of course the imports, but those imports have been almost universally from foreign kid-centric networks with either close ties to Disney Channel or outright owned by Disney itself - but the biggest thing is the Hotel Transylvania series which is entirely made, produced and distributed by Universal Television Animation, one of Disney's arch-rivals) and there have been streaming exclusives from Disney Channel before - but up to this point they were on what used to be Watch Disney Channel, now DisneyGO. Those "streaming exclusives" were also second-run imports too, mainly some British children's cooking competition thingie (they also had Free Period which was an actual American production from Maker Studios, though that is also owned by Disney, and basically a single-cam version of So Random!! - in either case they were somewhat throwaway). But this is the first major series that will only be viewable with a paid subscription, specifically to Disney, above and outside what you're already paying to your traditional subscription TV provider (or in lieu of if you're cutting the cable although I pointed out the issues with that above).

Also I need to point out I got this news from NickAndMore's twitter, though it doesn't seem he posted it on his website yet so I'm not going to bother to post the article here (because it doesn't exist, weirdly).