Discovery+ streaming network launches in Jan 2021

From here.

Discovery networks include Discovery network, Travel Channel, HGTV, Food Network, Animal Planet, TLC, OWN, Investigation Discovery, BBC’s natural history collection, others. They’ll have a bunch of new original series and documentaries for the network, too.

They’ll also have some content from A&E networks, but not… they’re not highlighting the good stuff. “More than 1,500 episodes of content from popular franchises from A&E networks on discovery+ will include The First 48 , Bring It , Dance Moms , Ice Road Truckers , Pawn Stars , Ancient Aliens , Storage Wars , 60 Days In , Intervention and Ghost Hunters

Cost will be $5/mo ad supported or $7/mo ad free. You can have 5 profiles and 4 simultaneous streams.

I’m pretty excited. I like the sort of stuff discovery channel used to do 20+ years ago before, like everything else, it networked decayed into ghost hunters and other random crap. So I haven’t seen anything they’ve made in like 15-20 years. But with all their content available for streaming I can find the good stuff they’re still doing easily enough.

I’m also into a few shows on HGTV like Mediterranean life and Caribbean life and would love to have access to their old stuff.

I know a lot of people are going to grumble and say “eh, another streaming service!” but the reality is that getting all the content in the world for $12 a month like Netflix in 2011 was always a fluke of history and was never going to be the norm. This was before people realized that streaming was the future and sold their streaming rights for nothing because it seemed like a harmless extra income source.

“But it’s gonna cost as much as cable once you sign up for all the services!” - yeah, well, don’t. You don’t need to be subscribed to everything all at once. Only subscribe to what interests you, or rotate your subscriptions. Sub to HBO Max for a couple months, watch everything they have that interests you, then sub to disney+ for a while, whatever. I’ve had more stuff than I could possibly watch for like $20/mo and the libraries were always better than having cable.

$5-7/mo for a huge library (2500 shows, 55000 episodes) of a variety of stuff is an awesome deal. This is the first service I’ll be signing up for besides amazon/netflix/hulu.

Does anyone want to make recommendations for quality content on these networks that we would’ve missed if we haven’t had cable for the last 15-20 years?

Oh, and the service has a webpage up which is really just sort of a splash page right now, but shows some of the content they’ll have.

I was surprised there wasn’t any interest in this. The service started today, you can do a 7 day free trial. So far, looks good. I’m browsing the catalog and setting up profiles.