Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule. But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season, for a deep dive into Disney. Can it be a tech company? It’s the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney Plus — and it also tells us where it needs to go in the future to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Links: Disney Is a Tech Company? | Vulture Why Disney plussed itself | Vulture Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander | Decoder The clock is ticking on Disney’s streaming strategy | Decoder The Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is now available | The Verge Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus | The Verge How baseball's tech team built the future of television | The Verge The year Netflix ended the streaming wars | The Ringer Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Hey everybody, it's Nilay. Decoder is off this week for a short end of summer break. We'll be back with both the interview and explainer episodes after Labor Day. I'm pretty excited about what we have on the schedule. But while we're out, we wanted to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season for a deep dive into Disney.
We actually talk about Disney all the time on Decoder. You can tell a whole lot about the future of the entertainment industry by watching what Disney is up to, whether it's major management shakeups or streaming strategy pivots. Disney as a company is many things at once, and this season of Land of the Giants takes a deep dive into each of Disney's identities every episode.
For instance, is Disney a TV company? Is it a theme park's company? Is it an animation company? Is it Bob Iger's company? After all, he stepped down as CEO in 2021, only to return just a year later. The episode we're sharing here is the finale of this season's Land of the Giants, where host Joe Adelian explores perhaps the most important question looming over Disney.
Can it turn itself into a tech company? It's the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney+. It also tells us where the company needs to go in the future to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Okay, land of the giants on whether Disney can be a tech company. Here we go.
Ten years ago, HBO and its then-CEO Richard Plepler had one of those problems that most media execs would kill for.
We had a show which was so popular that it was doing huge numbers and it was overtaxing our distribution systems.
Things had gotten wild in Westeros. The Starks were on the run and the Lannisters were hanging on to power, barely.
Game of Thrones had already established itself as a singular sensation on the network. And the last episode of Game of Thrones in the fourth season crashed HBO Go. And I think that was a signal to us that we had a bit of a high-class problem.
In 2014, you could stream HBO's content online with HBO Go, but it wasn't the kind of streaming service we think of today. You actually had to have a cable subscription first or know somebody who did, which for some people started to feel like a secret code passed around through the Millennial Whisper Network.
It was really a whole usage pattern among young people. There was a whole new generation that was using the service differently. We needed to be ready for that. We needed to get ahead of it.
This new generation was not getting coaxial cords drilled into their homes and paying large bills every month for the cable bundle plus premium channels. But they did want to watch HBO shows.
Essentially, we had one mantra, right? We wanted... the consumer to be able to get HBO when they wanted it, where they wanted it, and how they wanted it.
So HBO needed to create a streaming-only platform, something that could handle tons more traffic than HBO Go, something people could access without a cable sub. And the company wanted to do it all very quickly.
We wanted to make sure that when the fifth season of Game of Thrones was introduced the following year, we were ready for it.
But HBO was not a tech company, so it needed to hire one to help, a company that knew how to take content and create a smooth, usable interface around it.
What kept coming back to us was that BAMTEC really were the best engineers, the best service, and that they could help us build our own back end, which would give us the capacity to distribute direct-to-consumer products.
BAMTEC, which was just called BAM at the time, was known for streaming Major League Baseball. It knew how to handle big event television. It came with stellar recommendations. It was perfect. So Plepler hired the company to build what became HBO Now.
I think we had about five, six months, if I remember correctly, to get this thing ready and to stress test it beforehand, which we did. to make sure we weren't going to not only embarrass ourselves, but create a huge problem with our consumers who were expecting to be able to see it in all different forms, including on HBO Now.
And then the day arrived, the season five premiere of Game of Thrones.
They're going to try to take away all of it. And then I can remember actually sitting in the conference room and watching the numbers go up, increasing as the minutes went by. And we helped. There were no tech glitches. There were no real problems. I wish you good fortune in the wars to come. And I can remember sitting there and seeing that it worked.
It was almost like I imagined the feeling of the NASA people when the rocket lands on the moon. And you said, you know, thank God it worked.
HBO was not the first TV company to build a streaming platform, but it was the first that mattered. And it was the first major media company, a company that had planted its flag on the back of cable, to say we're taking our content directly to the consumer. No more cable subscriptions and bundles and extra costs. You want to watch reruns of Sex and the City, the newest Game of Thrones?
Give us $14.95 a month and you got it. This was such a big deal that it really did feel like a moon landing. And not just to Plepler. HBO Now got the entire industry's attention. Because if HBO was feeling the squeeze from changing viewing habits, so was everyone else.
Every executive in our industry, the Showtime team, the Stars team, everybody was thinking about this transition.
Disney's Bob Iger was too.
On my way to the airport, my cell phone rang and it was Bob who wanted our verdict on our partnership with BAM Tech.
Bob Iger told Klepler that he was considering making an investment too, a big one, an investment in Disney's future. Iger and Disney wouldn't just go out and hire BamTech like HBO did. They'd eventually buy the whole company. Because Disney was not just going to create a streaming option. Streaming was about to redefine its whole business.
This is Land of the Giants, and I'm your host, Joe Adalia. On our final Disney episode, how does a 100-year-old media entertainment company compete with tech giants on their own turf? Who tries to become one of them, to beat them at their own game?
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Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see?
For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore.
That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
It's mind blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better.
One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other.
We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time.
So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other.
Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust.
I became president in 2012. It happens to be that my timing was spectacular relative to the performance of ESPN. This is John Skipper.
He spent the bulk of his career at the Walt Disney Company, first in the publishing division in the early 90s, and eventually as president of ESPN. Over the course of his own career's ascent, he saw Disney's cable business grow to unprecedented heights of profitability. But in 2012, when Skipper became president and ESPN's performance was so wildly spectacular, something else happened.
It also happens that 2012 was the first year that there was a tiny decline in the number of pay television subscribers.
The numbers were still enormous, but for the first time, they weren't growing. And Skipper, in his new position, now got to hear how the leaders of the company thought about this loss.
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.
Danger from a completely new way of watching TV and movies that could peel away cable subscribers, undermining Disney's most lucrative division at the time. So why not meet the consumer where they were? Why not make a Disney streaming service to capture the millennial flight from cable? A win was a win, right? Not exactly. Richard Plepler from HBO again.
The fundamental question was how do you build to the new world order without cannibalizing an enormous amount of revenue?
Internal resources were finite, so dumping a bunch of money into streaming while cable was still so profitable just did not make sense.
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.
And it wasn't like cable was just making more than streaming at this point. Streaming companies weren't really making any money at all. Sure, Netflix technically had modest profits on paper, but it was racking up billions of dollars in debt. But it didn't have to make money.
Wall Street valued Netflix as a tech company and had its blessing to spend, spend, spend because all it cared about was the company's stratospheric growth in subscribers. Netflix could worry about turning a real profit later. Disney was a media company, an old one, a company that had been making profits for decades, paying regular dividends to its shareholders.
It wasn't supposed to spend billions of dollars on unproven projects. It didn't have that kind of leeway. And so Disney waited, and it leaned into what was still working, the cable bundle.
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.
They deal with the customer service issues. We just get paid.
What Skipper is saying here is that Disney and ESPN made the content. ESPN, for instance, racked up sports rights, cultivated on-air talent, and expanded into narrative documentaries. But it never once had to send a bill to a customer. So maybe there was something more holding Disney back from making a switch to streaming. Something more than pie charts and future modeling.
Maybe it was Disney's own understanding of its place in the world order. Disney wasn't a tech company like Netflix, nor was it a distributor also like Netflix. Early on, Disney did partner with other big media companies to build a Hulu, but it mostly existed to make next-day reruns of broadcast shows available online. You originally didn't even need a paid subscription to watch.
But fully owning and operating a Disney-branded streaming platform just did not feel like the company's lane, and it didn't feel like a good investment either. So why not dip a toe in and let another company handle the hard stuff? A company that could eat the cost of maintaining the platform. Someone to deal with the people.
A partner who would pay Disney a lot of money for the privilege of streaming its movies for them. Disney turned to the incumbent.
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.
Disney had already worked out a fairly lucrative deal in 2010 for Netflix to stream some ABC shows. But now, in 2012, Disney was about to make an even bigger deal. Netflix would pay Disney about $300 million a year for the rights to stream the latest Disney movies. Some stuff from the vault, too.
For Disney, this was sort of like free money from Netflix, and the company got to be where consumers were. This partnership would allow Disney to stay in its lane. But the deal had some unintended consequences.
Disney was licensing movies to Netflix.
Here's Bob Iger talking to Kara Swisher in 2022 during a brief window of time when he was not Disney CEO.
And they were helping to build their platform on the back of our movies and having the direct relationship with the consumer and building this global subscription business, which they did a brilliant job of, really. They deserve a lot of credit.
And Netflix wasn't just using Disney's movies to grow. There were those ABC shows like Lost and Grey's Anatomy that Disney had licensed to Netflix. And Disney even began making original Marvel shows for the streamer.
Daredevil? Sounds like he's going to jump Snake River Canyon on his rocket cycle.
This was Disney feeding its very own DNA directly into the Netflix machine, giving over its precious IP to engineer specific shows designed to convince consumers to sign up for Netflix.
I think the feeling was, yeah, but we own the underlying intellectual property. A distributor won't win. A creative company will win.
By supplying great content to Netflix, Disney was getting paid. But it was also building Netflix's business, helping it become a primary pick for home entertainment. Disney thought its identity as an entertainment company would keep it relevant over a tech company. But as more and more people turned to Netflix for entertainment, it all got a little confusing for Disney.
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.
But the lines were beginning to blur. Was Disney's partner actually the competition? Disney thought it had some time to figure things out. Here's Matthew Ball, an author and independent analyst today. Ball has been watching the streaming war since he was the head of strategy for Amazon Studios.
There was a belief that streaming would continue to grow single, two, three, four percentage points of all video, but that pay TV would still remain the dominant form of access. That Netflix was too far behind in terms of reach, in terms of development expertise, in terms of original content to ever wage a significant war against Hollywood, let alone curb the dominance of pay TV.
But between 2012, when Disney made its movie deal with Netflix, and 2015, when Bob Iger called HBO's Richard Plepler, viewing habits rapidly changed. Internet speeds in the US more than doubled within the space of a few years, making streaming feasible for more people.
And devices from companies like Roku and Apple took off, making it easier than ever to watch streaming services like Netflix directly on your TV set instead of on a computer or iPad. And within that same period, Netflix started to stand out as a destination for original, top-of-the-line shows. It outbid traditional studios to make House of Cards with top-tier talent.
created a viral sensation with Orange is the New Black. And yes, it began production on a series of Disney Marvel originals, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and more. With Disney's help, Netflix had torn down the wall between content companies and tech companies.
It's unquestionably true that the licensing decisions that Disney and others did with Netflix... accelerated the decline of their traditional business, and enabled Netflix to become the company it did today.
Which, in retrospect, might look like an absolutely bonkers business strategy on the part of Disney. But John Skipper says it's more complicated than that. The Wall Street beast needed to be fed.
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.
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.
And just because you know something's out there doesn't mean you can avoid crashing into it, even if you're the CEO.
I woke up one day and thought, we're basically selling nuclear weapons technology to a third world country, and now they're using it against us. Yeah. That's literally what I said.
By 2015, Iger had caught on. He was watching Game of Thrones on HBO's shiny new streaming platform. And ESPN's cable subscribers had started to make a big enough dip for him to feel like he had to tell investors about it.
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.
Meanwhile, Netflix wasn't the only tech company that had made the leap into entertainment. Amazon was starting to produce zeitgeist shows like Transparent. And studios that made premium content were sprouting up in previously unlikely places. So now it was time for Disney to make a pivot, for the entertainment company to act like a tech company, for Disney to become a streamer itself.
Step one, it made its first big investment in BAM tech in 2016, and eventually bought the whole company for more than $3.5 billion.
And there was enormous wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth about, why are we buying this technology?
But Skipper, along with Kevin Mayer, who would go on to lead Disney's streaming reconfiguration, didn't think there was too high a price for this technology. BamTech was the best in class, and Disney needed a quick way to speed to the top.
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.
In other words, Wile E. Coyote could see the cliff. And so if Disney had arrived at the edge of the chasm, it had no other choice but to dive in. By August 2017, Iger was ready to go public with a plan.
We will launch a Disney-branded streaming service in 2019. which will be unlike anything else in the market. With this strategic shift, we'll end our distribution agreement with Netflix.
Netflix would no longer be Disney's partner, Disney's buyer, Disney's source for easy money. It would be Disney's direct competitor. There was just one problem.
When you take a look at the start of the streaming wars, there's no official date, of course, but we tend to discuss it as starting at the end of 2019. Well, that's because we had, in a matter of weeks, Apple TV+, then Disney Plus launch. In the second quarter of the following year, we had Quibi, we had HBO Max, we had Peacock.
So instead of having something of a streaming battle, Disney duking it out with Netflix, Disney Plus dropped into more of a streaming war.
It's not just that Netflix was enabled for too long. It's not just that traditional media was too slow to launch their streaming services. It's that they all waited, all launched at the same time. and therefore made it harder, more expensive, and more patience-testing for any one of them to thrive and succeed.
They launched at a time of peak competition, and that meant the churn was much higher, the strain on a balance sheet was harder still, and shareholder scrutiny was about to be higher than ever.
Coming up, Disney was now a streamer. and a major player in the streaming wars. To compete, it was going to have to double down on the idea that it was both a creative company and a tech company.
Psychedelics, so hot right now. Studies are showing they can help with PTSD, depression, even addiction.
But there's been kind of this major problem lurking under those positive results.
It's basically impossible to take a psychedelic and not know that you've taken a psychedelic, which makes it pretty hard to have things like placebos or controlled trials.
And that kind of breaks the sort of fundamental logic of how researchers study how medicines work.
This week on Unexplainable, how psychedelics might be exposing some major cracks in the foundation of scientific research. Follow Unexplainable for new episodes every Wednesday.
This week on ProfgMarkets, we speak with chips market expert Patrick Moyad. We discuss Intel's fall from grace, what makes Nvidia such a strong company, and his predictions for the future of the chip industry.
What I think I can tell you is Nvidia will lose market share. But you know what? It doesn't matter. because the market is growing at a much higher rate that offsets any type of share shift to, let's say, AMD or these homegrown chips from the hyperscalers.
You can find that conversation and many others exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast.
I remember it very well. It was the meeting that changed my life.
In 2018, Alana Pena was just getting her start in TV.
I was a baby writer.
She was working as a writer's assistant on a TV show called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. And her new agent called her up and asked, got any show ideas? We want a comedy.
I wrote it on spec, meaning I wrote a script that nobody asked for except my agents.
This is what it was like during the boom times of streaming.
Everything seems possible. There were so many networks, it felt like every writer that I was working with in the room had a show in the works, or if they didn't, they were talking about having a show in the works.
And in 2018, these networks were starting new platforms, and so were thirsty for more content than ever before, because they were building up their arsenals for the streaming wars.
My agent was like, there's this new component of Disney launching. It's called Disney Plus. And she knew the exec over there. She was like, she has excellent taste. I'm going to send the script over.
The exec did have good taste and invited Pena to come in and pitch her show, a story about a young teen.
It was a coming-of-age story about her, her brother, her widowed mom. And then the thing that she doesn't know but the audience knows is that she becomes president.
Madam President, what is in there?
It's my old diary. I started writing it in the sixth grade. It's a day-by-day account of how I got here. I really had a lot to say. I wanted to basically tell the story inspired by my adolescence and growing up, but I didn't want her to become a television writer.
The response to the pitch was extremely positive. Disney picked up the series the same day Pena pitched it. Gina Rodriguez was a producer, and it was called Diary of a Future President.
Disney Plus had said they wanted a lot. They wanted to have original shows. They wanted to have original creators. It seemed like they wanted to be a competitor for Netflix, for Amazon, in terms of the original space. You know, not be beholden to IP.
Disney Plus wanted to be well-stocked on content for all corners of the streaming battlefield. And so the company ordered every entertainment division to get working, creating fresh new shows like Diary and tons of shows based on existing Disney IP. And then there was all of Disney's back catalog, the movies and shows that families with kids would love to have at their fingertips.
But the streaming wars were gearing up, battles forming on every front, tons of enemies, few allies, and Netflix leading the charge with a decade-long head start. Every strategic advantage needed to be seized and leveraged. Every opportunity needed to be considered.
Homer Simpson here, proud addition to the Disney family and soon appearing on Disney+. I, for one, salute our new corporate overlords.
Disney bought 21st Century Fox in 2019 for over $71 billion, giving it 30 seasons of The Simpsons and also Avatar, the Die Hard and Alien franchises, Titanic, and also a majority stake in Hulu. All of these assets helped Disney to expand far beyond its core family brand. Here's Ben Fritz, editor with The Wall Street Journal, who covered Disney at the time.
The thinking in large part was that, look, Disney has these great brands, but they don't have a huge content library. It was not nearly as big as what Netflix already had.
Now, family, put on the mouse ears. You only get one chance to make a first impression.
I don't wanna, I'm not gonna, you can't make me.
For over a decade, Bob Iger spent billions on acquisitions that helped expand Disney's creative reach. But that was a drop in the ocean compared to what they were now spending to beef up for the streaming wars.
I will say that when we did the Fox deal, it was all through the lens of needing scale to achieve success in the direct-to-consumer digital platform space.
In order to compete with the Apples and Amazons and Netflixes of the world, Disney needed to look, act, and spend like them. But it also needed something else, some slack from Wall Street. Disney was spending like money wasn't real in order to build a service people would want to sign up for, just like the tech companies were. And so Iger had a pitch for investors.
The significant thing to know, Joe, is that he was telling Wall Street that you should value us based on the success of our streaming service. Value us the way you value Netflix, based on how many subscribers we get in streaming. Subscribers first, profits later. And much to Wall Street's delight, Disney Plus delivered huge numbers as soon as it launched in November of 2019. Matthew Ball.
The launch of Disney Plus was one of the most remarkable achievements we've ever seen in Hollywood.
Disney aimed to get 60 million subscribers within four years of launching.
And Reed Hastings, the founder and CEO of Netflix, said that if you had asked him at the time Disney Plus launched, what were the odds of getting there? He said it would be zero.
Within just one year, Disney had over 70 million. Its virtual overnight success surprised everyone. But in 2022, after a few years of slugging it out in an increasingly crowded field, another surprise was in store for all the players in the streaming wars. It was not a pleasant one.
Streaming giant Netflix suffered its biggest stock loss in nearly two decades, losing more than $50 billion in market value.
Yep, this comes as the company is reporting a drop in subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. It was like a bomb went off throughout the industry. If growth wasn't guaranteed, Wall Street had a new demand, profits. Streamers had to show they could make money fast.
I got a call, and it was a call from an exec.
That's Alana Pena again. In 2023, this incoming call, sort of a head-scratcher for Pena. After a two-season run, Diary of a Future President had already been canceled, a while ago. The exec got right to the point. She told Pena that Disney Plus was taking Diary off its platform, scrubbed, erased, not a trace of its 20 episodes to be found. Not because the show was bad.
A lot of people really loved it. But because its non-existence was worth something to the company. Removing shows allows platforms to write them off for tax breaks. Lots of streamers turned to this option during the Netflix correction, including Disney. The company purged dozens of original shows across Disney Plus and Hulu.
The thing that was the worst part of all of it, I had to tell all the kids who are in it that it was being taken off the platform. And they don't have context for that, or at least they didn't, because everything that they've ever wanted to watch, they have been able to watch their whole lives. The kids were pretty devastated. Yeah.
But this purge was buying Disney some time, allowing it to recoup a little money while it figured out how to shift strategy in this new era, where Wall Street was demanding real profits and growth. Here's Jessica Reif-Ehrlich, longtime analyst for B of A Securities.
So the pivot now is when having enough quality content to try to keep churn to a minimum, but grow your profitability. So there is a sea change in what's going on. Content spend is coming down for everybody, including Netflix.
Disney needed to be ruthless with controlling costs. And it didn't stop at erasing existing content. Disney cut way back on commissioning new shows. And yes, there were lots and lots of layoffs. Because despite trying to spend like a tech company, Disney just wasn't one of them.
Companies like Amazon and Apple could drop a bajillion dollars on original content because streaming was a side business.
So it's the traditional media companies competing with the fan companies who are much better capitalized. And they use streaming to drive other businesses.
For Netflix, streaming wasn't a side business. It was just business. But it also had the advantage of being first with the greatest brand recognition in the streaming space. Disney didn't have any of this. And yet, its strategy to compete with Netflix had been to try to become Netflix. the company needed a new strategy. It didn't need to stop acting like a tech company entirely.
Streaming was still core to its business. But maybe there was a more Disney way to go about things. A way to lean into 100 years of experience surprising and delighting audiences.
At the end of the day, one of the Core problems with the streaming wars, or the biggest challenges faced by Hollywood, was that outside of the bundle, every company was a choice by a customer.
And perhaps no other choice had more brand awareness or affinity than the Walt Disney Company. Generational love, nostalgia, memory, and myth-making. That's all Disney.
No customer sat there saying, I want all of the films and TV series from that studio or this studio. I want to surround my child's life with the IP of that 80-year-old studio. But Disney was the exception.
It was time to look to the past and look within in order to define the future.
In the two years since Iger returned, they've close to doubled the price point for Disney+. He has communicated very clearly that their priority is no longer matching the number of subscribers that Netflix has, but making sure that the subscribers that Disney Plus has today value it properly.
That means not trying to appeal to every possible subscriber. It means leaning into the content it already does well. Disney fairy tales, Pixar robots, the Avengers, Luke Skywalker may not be for everyone, but they're indispensable to a lot of people. So indispensable that people will keep paying, even after price hikes.
Today, if you want to subscribe to Disney Plus without ads, without bundling it with Hulu or ESPN, you have to pay $13.99. When it launched, it was $6.99 per month.
There are still few customers who will say they're happy Disney's price has doubled since it launched, but I think most will tell you that they can't imagine getting rid of it as long as they have kids.
It seems the path forward for Disney is to be Disney. Sure, it can infuse its business with lessons from tech competitors, but it can also lean on its deep roots and delighting audiences, and even its experience with the cable bundle. Disney recently decided to strike a wartime alliance with Warner Brothers Discovery to create a sort of unified offering.
You can now get access to Disney+, Hulu, and Max at a discount. This is Tech Meets The Bundle. And it's an example of Disney getting out of Netflix's shadow to fight the streaming wars on its own terms. Netflix is still winning those wars despite the dip in subscribers back in 2022. It has more members than any other service. But Disney is number two, and it leads in another distinctly Disney way.
Nielsen reports that Americans spend more time watching Disney platforms, streaming shows, cable channels, ABC, than any other company's platforms. And in terms of profitability, Disney streaming platforms are, for the first time, generating some cash. It's still modest, but a lot better than where they were last year, which was losing hundreds of millions of dollars.
In other ways, though, Disney Plus still has a long way to go. The interface is clunky, and its algorithm doesn't hold a candle to Netflix's. Churn, people canceling their subscriptions, is a major problem. But all of these issues wouldn't even exist if not for the fact that Disney is now a company that is much more expansive and innovative in the digital space than it was even a decade ago.
There still isn't a broader story of how Disney, a now 100-year-old company, is not just going to endure for another 100 years, but is going to be a bigger and more important, more essential business reaching more customers.
Over the course of our season, we've looked at how Disney has been able and sometimes struggled to push itself forward into the future while preserving the company that Walt Disney and his brother Roy founded at the beginning of the 20th century. Streaming might just be the hardest leap that Disney has had to pull off, but Ball also sees it as the most promising.
One thing that I think time has forgotten is that Walt never really envisioned the business as just about the production of linear content. I don't just mean his famous 1957 diagram of the Walt Disney Company flywheel, but even when you go to the first feature films that they produced, he always imagined that content experiences were transformative, that they were felt in the real world.
It's not yet clear how tech will augment the ways in which people, children and families included, experience Disney, other than just a tool Disney uses to squeeze out more money from its park-goers or gather data to inform its algorithm. What is clear is that Disney is a company that grows in order to stay relevant.
It bought Capital City's ABC just in time to ride the cable wave, acquired Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, and Lucasfilm to expand its IP universe and its audience, and dotted the globe with its theme parks. Integrating streaming is the latest version of this strategy, growing, evolving Walt's Flywheel, and still remaining Disney. That's it for our season.
Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma is produced by Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Special thanks to Brandon Santos, Darian Mucha, Brian LaBombard, Jillian Robbins, and Liam Brooks. And of course, thanks to my colleagues at Vulture, Rebecca Alter, Bilga Abiri, and Chris Lee for joining me as hosts this season.
This episode included clips from HBO, Disney, the podcast Sway, Warner Brothers Discovery, CNBC, and CBS Evening News. Charlotte Silver is our lead producer. Joe Lee Myers is our editor. Claire Cronin is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the theme and mixed and scored this episode. Neil Janowitz is the editor-in-chief of Vulture. Art Chung is our showrunner.
Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. And I'm Joe Adalian. Thanks for listening to our season. If you liked it, tell a friend.
Hey, Joe.
Yeah, Charlotte.
You just finished your first season of Land of the Giants. What are you going to do next?
I'm going to Disneyland.
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