Why Disney Gave Away This ‘Star Wars’ Show For Free

Few trends seem as inexplicable as the one which is sweeping through Hollywood at the moment. After spending years, and billions of dollars, building up exclusive content libraries for their streaming platforms, studios are selling shows and movies to rival platforms and are even giving them away for free.

Even the most famous franchises aren’t immune to this treatment. Last month Disney stunned the media industry when it unexpectedly uploaded the first three episodes of the first season of its hit Star Wars spinoff series Andor to YouTube where they can still be watched at no cost.

Andor stars Mexican actor Diego Luna as the eponymous spy who works for the heroic Rebels as they try to take on the might of the Empire, led by legendary villain Darth Vader. The batch of three episodes tells the first part of Andor’s story and forms the first of four mini-arcs which see him rise from rogue to revolutionary. Each of the mini-arcs is relatively self-contained as they introduce and wrap-up major storylines. They don’t come cheap.

As this report revealed, Andor’s first season cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and was commissioned for the Disney+ streaming platform. The show debuted in 2022 so plenty of time has passed for fans to find out about the series. However, until the first three episodes appeared on YouTube there was still a chance they would attract new subscribers to Disney+ thanks to the high caliber of the show.

Critics awarded Andor’s first season an average of 96% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes whilst its audience score of 87% is higher than any other Disney+ Star Wars show. Indeed, it is even higher than any of Disney’s Star Wars movies with the exception of 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story which directly follows on from Andor.

Thanks to Andor’s blockbuster popularity, word is still spreading about the show so making multiple episodes available on YouTube was far from risk free. Although viewers still have to subscribe to Disney+ to find out what happens later in the series, they don’t have to pay a cent to find out what all the hype is about.

It caused some to claim that the move was designed purely to drive promotion of Andor ahead of the debut of its second season on Tuesday. In turn, this fueled suspicion about whether it would be a commercial success. Audience data hasn’t yet been released for the second season though early indications suggest that the stars have aligned once again.

The second season’s 96% Rotten Tomatoes’ critics rating is equivalent to that of its predecessor whilst its audience score is only seven percentage points lower. Nevertheless, other Star Wars productions have performed poorly commercially despite being critical successes.

Indeed, earlier this year, Disney’s previous Star Wars streaming show, Skeleton Crew, failed to make it into Nielsen’s top ten despite critics rating it 92% with audiences awarding it a respectable 80%. It suffered from audience apathy following the backlash against last year’s Star Wars streaming series The Acolyte which was branded woke due to its emphasis on diversity. Although Disney’s decision to upload episodes of Andor to YouTube may look like an act of desperation to stop it suffering the same fate as Skeleton Crew, in fact, there is no hint of a disturbance in the force.

Posting movies or shows on YouTube gives studios access to a new revenue stream and reaches a new audience which is why Disney isn’t the only media company doing it. As the Sunday Times newspaper recently reported, British broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 also share entire episodes of television shows on YouTube even though it competes with their own streaming platforms.

According to the newspaper, both broadcasters have struck deals with YouTube which enable them to get access to user data and sell their own adverts. These special deals are in stark contrast to the typical model which sees many content creators only keep 45% of revenues from their YouTube videos.

ITV’s chief executive Carolyn McCall explained to the Sunday Times that YouTube creates new audiences for the broadcaster rather than drawing its existing customers away from its own platform. “It’s very beneficial to us because the viewers on YouTube are not viewers of ITV,” she said. “They are very complementary, highly separated audiences – much younger, much more male, on YouTube.”

According to the latest Media Nations report from Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, in 2023, the average adult spent 38 minutes watching YouTube at home, compared to 21 minutes on Netflix. Similarly, in the United States, YouTube is viewed by more people on televisions than on desktops and mobiles according to its chief executive Neal Mohan.

Warner Bros. too is capitalizing on this and has begun to release its back catalog for free on YouTube. Since the start of this year alone it has uploaded more than 30 movies to the platform including The Adventures of Pluto Nash starring Eddie Murphy, The Mission with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio’s climate change documentary The 11th Hour. All viewers, except for YouTube Premium subscribers, will see ads in the movies and although this enables studios to tap into a new revenue stream, it wasn’t necessarily what spurred them to take the plunge with streaming content for free.

Once studios put their content on their own streaming platforms it was quickly copied by pirates and made available for free all over the world. Usage rates of these rogue sites have surged as consumers’ purse strings have been pulled tight due to the cost of living crisis.

Last year Bloomberg revealed that there have been more than 140 billion visits to pirate streaming sites since 2020 compared to about 105 billion prior to the pandemic according to estimates from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center.

It is too late for studios to get the genie back in the bottle now that their content is online. Pirates remain one step ahead of them by using what are known as mirrored websites which copy their own content so if one gets shut down another is waiting in the wings. By uploading movies to YouTube, studios are challenging the pirates head on. It isn’t the only way they are doing it.

In May 2023 Disney pulled nearly 50 titles from Disney+ enabling it to get a tax write-off on them or loan them out to Free Ad-Supported TV (FAST) platforms. Paramount Global followed suit while downsizing its Showtime platform. The studios realized that some titles are more valuable earning ad dollars on FAST platforms than they are sitting in the library of a Subscription Video On Demand service.

It brings studios like Disney full circle. Before Disney+ was launched in late 2019, the Mouse went to great pains to pull its content from rival streamers and spent billions on commissioning exclusive content for its own platform. When the pandemic swept around the world, Disney+ came into its own as the curtain came down on movie theaters and consumers were locked down in their homes craving new content.

Subscriber numbers surged and by the time that theater turnstiles began turning again, studios were releasing movies on their streaming platforms at the same time that they debuted on the silver screen. It caused cinemas to struggle but the tide began to turn when the pandemic receded. As customers returned to work they had less time to watch streaming services so subscriber numbers nosedived. Studios reinstated the window of exclusivity for exhibitors and admissions have steadily risen in recent years even though they are still below their pre-pandemic highs.

By pulling content and licensing it to FAST platforms, studios are heading back to where they were before the advent of streaming. The big difference is the abundance of free content. Superhero series Ms Marvel, which was originally exclusive to Disney+, even ended up on Disney’s own free to air linear ABC network whilst the first season of Andor has also made its way to the streaming service Hulu. Time will tell whether this increased exposure will have a magic touch on the second season of the sci-fi series.