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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

On top of the... 'opportunity cost' of not licensing out content that otherwise would have went to Netflix, ABC, whoever.

If previously Disney made Daredevil and 'sold' it to Netflix for $1m (hypothetically), but now you're holding that back to stream yourself, you've got to account for that missing $1m somehow.

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No you don't. You don't normally include opportunity cost on your balance sheet.

yes and no. The problem is if last year they earned $1m from it by it being on Netflix. Moving it to their own streaming platform will look like a $1m less revenue.

Depending on how org and financials are structured Disney+ may need to purchase Daredevil from the other part of Disney for $1m, which is recognising that opportunity cost.

Not to be pedantic (ok a little bit), but you don't normally include any costs on your balance sheet, but you might want to include them on your income statement.

You don't, however Disney was making this money before as they were directly licensing it to these services, so it's not just opportunity cost, but actual lost revenue when compared to previous years.

These deals can be complex. Consider if you were going to make a movie, and were shopping it around to studios.

If Studio A was like "we'll give you a 10% cut of whatever we then license it for for streaming" and Disney was like "we're gonna stream it on our own platform for free, sorry" that's a negotiation problem for Disney. So selling internally at market rate is a good thing for relationships with external creators and partners.

It seems like it’d be infinitely more fair to say “should we stream it in house, here is how royalties will be calculated.”

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