On November 12 this year, Disney launches a new streaming service called Disney +. A trial version of the streaming platform was launched in the Netherlands on 12 September 2019, followed by the official release in the United States and Canada on 12 November. In this way, possible technical problems that could arise can be solved before Disney + officially appears on the American market. But will the new streaming platform be a worthy competitor for Netflix?

The company announced that Disney + will cost $ 7 a month (Cohen, 2019). That is a lot less than the $ 13 Netflix asks for their most popular subscription in the US. Yet, based on functionality Disney + does not yet equal Netflix. For example, the streaming giant has films and series available in multiple languages and focusses on a bigger target group. Consequently, since Disney + is mainly focusing on families, Netflix will have more relevant offerings for adults.

Although Disney+ does not have such a wide catalog as Netflix, it tries to compensate for other features. For example, every account can create up to seven user-profiles whereas with Netflix this limit is six profiles. Additionally, Disney + will stream in 4K HDR and uses Dolby Atmos to support the newest sound format (Cohen, 2019).

Interestingly, in addition to the Disney classics, purchased content and own productions, the films from Marvel will also come to Disney + (Geels, 2019). A large part of these films can now be seen via Netflix. However, this will change in the course of the year and it will be very interesting to see how Netflix will fill up this loss.

With a lower price than Netflix and a high image quality, Disney hopes to be able to quickly seduce many consumers. The company wants to have between 60 and 90 million worldwide subscribers by 2024. For comparison: Netflix now has 140 million (Geels, 2019). However, with a very large and popular catalog, Disney + has the potential to become a serious competitor for Netflix. What do you think about the future course of these two streaming platforms?

References:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/how-much-does-disney-plus-cost/

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/08/19/videodienst-disney-in-november-in-nederland-a3970512

Imagine this: it is a hot summer day and your brains are sending a stimulus that translates into – “I want a Milk Shake!”. So you go to the nearest McDonald’s restaurant and pull up at the order point in the Drive Trough. Suddenly, a soft and sweet robotic voice, one of which Alexa would be jealous, welcomes you and asks what you want to order. “Can I have one Big Mac and a Diet Coke, please”. Of course, you order something entirely different than you initially planned. The robotic voice, let’s call her McSweety, then repeats your order, asks for conformation, and sends you to the next window. With McDonald’s acquiring Apprente, a voice-based tech company specialized in speech recognition, this is becoming a viable future.

In doing so, the fast-food giant has developed a vision where the way we order our hamburgers and french fries will become more automated. With this technology – which can understand orders spoken aloud – McDonald’s wants to develop automatic interaction in the Drive Trough. So, the main pros look simple: a more efficient and faster order experience for their customers and an increased degree in automated labor which can lead to savings on the payroll. Moreover, the technology should be able to handle complex, multilingual, multi-accent and multi-item orders. But I do wonder what happens when there is a heavy storm outside and a customer with loud hip hop music banging out of his stereos is still hesitating about his order? Does he get an Mc(w)Rap?

Voice recognition has become a driver for tech innovation. Nowadays, this technology is advancing at an exponential rate in various industries, ranging from fast-food to healthcare, as companies are competing to develop their own voice technology integrations to keep pace with consumer demand.  Accordingly, this trend supports the development of voice-recognition technology to become more sophisticated and useful for practice. However, the deficiency of relevant knowledge and experience makes it particularly hard for many companies to adopt a sound voice strategy. In the example of McDonald’s, a partnership or even a take-over could just be the answer.

There is a lot of opportunity for a much deeper and more efficient understanding concerning the implementation of speech recognition in company processes. What do you think the future will hold for us?

Sources:

Bregler, C., & Konig, Y. (1994, April). ” Eigenlips” for robust speech recognition. In Proceedings of ICASSP’94. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Vol. 2, pp. II-669). IEEE.

Gales, M. J., & Young, S. J. (1996). Robust continuous speech recognition using parallel model combination. IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, 4(5), 352-359.

Juang, B. H., & Chen, T. (1998). The past, present, and future of speech processing. IEEE signal processing magazine, 15(3), 24-48.

https://www.biometricupdate.com/201909/mcdonalds-acquires-apprente-to-bring-speech-recognition-to-drive-thrus