NOTE: The following is a little outside of the normal realm of content here at *Rope Drop [dot] Net. Since every Disney site seems to be blindly reporting the news about Disney’s streaming service, however, I felt a little context was in order.

This week has been an interesting week for content models and content delivery. On Monday, Netflix purchased the intellectual portfolio of a comic creator Mark Millar.. In his usual, modest, humble approach to things, Millar likened the move to Disney’s purchase of Marvel back in 2009. Though I, obviously, don’t agree with that sentiment, the move is consistent with Netflix’s clear strategy of becoming a content creator and owner, not just a content delivery mechanism. See, e.g., Netflix’s commitment to spending $6 billion on original content in 2017. The same goes for, predominantly, tech companies Amazon and Apple, who have also made clear moves into the content ownership and content creation space.

With all of those moves by technology companies into the content creation and ownership space, is it any wonder that earlier today, Disney—a long term content creator and owner—announced that by 2019 it would stop distributing its movies via Netflix and start its own streaming service. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see the clear trend of content creation and content delivery converging. Since Disney, unlike the tech companies discussed above, already has the content library (and the ability to produce new content), it needs to develop the technical side of things. That’s why the biggest news out of Disney’s announcement is probably its acquisition (for a cool $1.58 billion) of a majority interest in BAM Tech, one of the leading providers of video streaming on the web. Disney is now poised to use technology it owns to deliver its content (including ESPN content) directly to its consumers, without having to deal with some kind of technological middle man. After all, if Netflix, Apple, and Amazon are going to position themselves as silos of content delivered by their own respective technologies, shouldn’t Disney position itself to do the same thing?

Of course, the proliferation of streaming services with their own content silos might not be the best end game for consumers. Discussion has already started online as to how many streaming services we will need to subscribe to in order to watch the various content we’re interested in. With Disney throwing its hat in the ring today, my answer to that questions is: 1 more service than I thought I had to subscribe to yesterday.