Disney can't. See the issue with the Star Wars movies. They licensed stuff out. Eventually they will get it back, but probably not when this launches. And, you aren't going to get all of that. If they were going to give you archives of everything, they would have said by now. You are going to get what they want to give you. Mostly the current stuff on the various Disney channels, the last couple of movies, the family friendly stuff from ABC, whatever they pull from Freeform, a rotating crop of the older stuff at their discretion, and some new content.
Licensing is a mess, but that's a question I'm sure Disney have already considered.
Then if you want adult shows you're going to need Hulu. The Marvel shows on Netflix are not family friendly. I can't see how they are going to this service. There is a ton of bad language, violence, and sex in them. It will be interesting to see where they end up.
Right, so what is the upper bound of subscription services a household will likely have? That to me is a question that should trouble Netflix more than Disney. Start with the premise that a decent percentage of US households already have
Amazon Prime, so they have one streaming service essentially for free. That service covers a lot of the same ground as Netflix. Disney remove their content from Netflix, which eventually may be all content including Fox assets, and split them across Hulu and Disneyflix. So for the cost of two (or three if they want sports) subscriptions, an average family would get most of Disney/21CF, and most of everything else.
Disney doesn't need to compete with Netflix because Netflix is still reliant on the Disney catalog, and doesn't yet have enough material of its own to offset the difference. That basically means that Netflix's prime competition is Amazon, who are essentially billing their service as 'free'.
Star Trek has a huge fan base. The estimate is 8-8.5 million per episode making it one of the most expensive shows ever made, yet considerably less than the proposed Star Wars budget. CBS All Access was at slightly less than 2 million subscribers when Star Trek was announced, now it is slightly more. That's the math Disney needs to find a way around. Dropping $100 million into 10 episodes of Star Wars is a loss leader. Hopefully it won't be so much of one they shy away from Star Wars shows in the future.
Star Trek is a bad example, I think. That one aims fairly squarely at the cord-never demographic who just aren't that interested in anything else on CBS, and are more than willing to wait for the BluRay, or just torrent the show. People will continue to pay for Hulu regardless, and so Disney just needs to sell a service to families that likely would be paying the extra Disney channels through their cable provider.
So to your broader licensing question: do Disney have deep enough pockets to fund a long-game war of attrition, where pretty much everyone is aiming their guns at Netflix?
[ETA: HBO are an interesting case since they routinely carry 'essential' shows, but much of their catalog is still movies you can watch elsewhere. That's why they are now basically a value add for expensive ATT services.]
