Mass Media & Technology

Disney+ UK Launch Date Confirmed

(November 2019)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
TT
TellyTime
Bad news for VM viewers.

Sky has confirmed:

We’ve partnered with Disney to be the only pay-TV provider to offer Disney+ on their platform.

https://www.sky.com/help/home/sky-tv/sky-tv-q/using-sky-q/q-tv-apps-test/using-sky-q-tv-apps/diagnostics/sky-tv-apps-on-sky-q/using-disney-plus
DV
DVB Cornwall
Stretching things there, I believe the correct statement should have been . .... the only pay-TV provider to deeply embed Disney+ ... which I believe from previous statement to be nearer the truth. We'll see.
JA
james-2001
Doesn't seem to excluse other services from adding Disney+ later, just that Sky are the first.
AJ
AJ
Sky will be the only platform with integrated billing. i.e. the ability to add Disney+ to your Sky bill.
JA
james-2001
All4 seem to have started streaming some episodes of The Simpsons, so at least there's some way to stream the proper 4:3 copies, even if they do only have the grand total of 5 episodes right now.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-simpsons/on-demand/41355-011
JO
Jonwo
Maleficent Mistress of Evil isn't there yet but I suspect that's because like Frozen 2, it was a fairly recent title so it'll debut in May or June.
JA
JAS84
All4 seem to have started streaming some episodes of The Simpsons, so at least there's some way to stream the proper 4:3 copies, even if they do only have the grand total of 5 episodes right now.

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-simpsons/on-demand/41355-011
Recently aired ones I assume?
GE
thegeek Founding member

Re: Simpsons - its the cropped FX versions.

It's not universally cropped - I've just watched 22 Short Films About Springfield (where else to start), and in the Steamed Hams skit, some shots are cropped, and some are Shatliffed to make the jokes work. I'm not sure which is worse really. I'll include some screengrabs from my laptop later, because the Android app doesn't let you take them.

just to correct myself, the shot I thought was Shatliffed wasn't, but some others have definitely been squashed, eg:
*
which should have course look like
*

someone must have put a lot of effort into going through this shot-by-shot in order to make it look a bit crap...
JA
james-2001
This is another one of the infamous cropped shots, why they couldn't have panned up and left all the sign in is a mystery. It actually looks like they cropped everything off the top and nothing off the bottom, so it'slike they just left it centred. Unless they considered the dirt to be more important than the joke on the sign.

*
*

The "HD" versions of the episodes are so poor in so many places, you wonder how they got allowed through. They were clearly so desperate to get widescreen and "HD" versions, they rushed the whole process. And now it seems we're stuck with these copies, like Star Wars fans are stuck with George Lucas's endless tinkering.

The Buffy HD remasters (also done by Fox) are just as infamous. Though at least they did rescan the original film in HD for that, unlike The Simpsons which is just the SD tapes cropped, upscaled and put through some sort of processing to sharpen the lines, clean up film dirt and brighten the colours.
Last edited by james-2001 on 24 March 2020 9:12pm - 3 times in total
JA
james-2001
My mum's not happy to see Old Yeller there. She saw it at the cinema when it first came out, and she's still haunted by it over 60 years later.
LL
Larry the Loafer
I thought Disney did a U-turn and said they'd reinstate the 4:3 versions of The Simpsons after a backlash in the US. Did I just make that up?
NJ
Neil Jones Founding member
Well since we're now effectively in lockdown, perhaps its an ideal time for people to learn that old stuff isn't pillar boxed for fun, its done for a reason. To stop it looking crap and distorted. Simple as.

I sometimes wonder if people think, when they watch Keeping Up Appearances in stretchyvision, that Patricia Routledge always looked like that...

I thought Disney did a U-turn and said they'd reinstate the 4:3 versions of The Simpsons after a backlash in the US. Did I just make that up?


That was for the launch of the US version of Disney+. Apparently they're going to "fix" it. In 2020.

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