John Skipper
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
I think the feeling was, yeah, but we own the underlying intellectual property. A distributor won't win. A creative company will win.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
We'd been so used to being in a world where there was this clear separation between the people who were creative and the people who were distributors.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
So yeah, when you were faced with, do we want to miss earnings for a couple of years? Or do we want to take Netflix's money, impress Wall Street with our earnings growth? And it worked. And it worked and worked and worked until it didn't work. People love the narrative that Disney messed up, didn't understand it was coming. We knew there was a precipice, but it was not right in front of us.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
We, you know, we're like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff. But if Wile E. Coyote can't see the end of the cliff... All he sees is desert in front of them. In our case, all we saw was lush jungle of money in front of us. And you don't see the cliff. You don't jump off before you have to, you know, drive me up to the cliff so I can jump off now.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
Bob actually believed in trying to be transparent to shareholders and to the street. I remember him saying, we have a responsibility to let people know that there is this thing we have to deal with.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
And there was enormous wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about, why are we buying this technology?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
My point, Kevin agreed with me, it's what we recommended to Bob, was it's not about the math. It's about existential existence.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
I became president in 2012. It happens to be that my timing was spectacular relative to the performance of ESPN. This is John Skipper.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
It also happens that 2012 was the first year that there was a tiny decline in the number of pay television subscribers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
Because at that point, I now am sitting at the staff meeting with Bob Iger and Alan Horn, the head of the studio, etc., etc., And they clearly had been thinking about it longer. They understood intellectually that there is some really significant thing coming, that there is danger.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
We would do these models where we would say, if we were to completely pivot, what would we have to charge and how many subscribers would we have to have? And it was a very scary thing to look at. And when you looked at it, you were like, hmm, that is not going to happen. It is not going to be possible that because at that point we still had 85 to 90 million subscribers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
And remember, it's a beautiful system. It's probably the best model in the history of media. The distributors deal with customer service. They deal with credit cards. They deal with how to get the signal to people. You don't have to do any of that. All we got to do is create content. We sell it to somebody else. They deal with all the technological issues.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
They deal with the customer service issues. We just get paid.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Disney Is a Tech Company?
It wasn't like Netflix came out of nowhere, but at the time, the people at the studio thought, oh, this is a great new revenue stream.