Disney Sees A Revenue And Profit Increase After Experimenting And A Streaming Push

TV & Film

Aug 7

Disney is having a good fiscal year with unexpected revenue. On Wednesday, the entertainment giant announced their third-quarter revenue of $23.7 billion, a 2% increase from last year, and an operating income of $4.6 billion, an 8% increase. The company also added 2.6 million Hulu and Disney+ subscribers and made a deal with the NFL to concentrate on ESPN content. The deal includes live WWE events airing on the streaming platform. Disney has plans to merge Disney+ and Hulu into a single streaming platform and has already moved toward this by including select shows from each platform on the other one. The combination just cements this move and reduces the number of apps required to stream the content. Disney is predicting an increase of about 10 million subscribers as part of a deal with Charter to include Disney+ in their TV packages.

CEO Bob Iger explained the purpose behind the new plans, “You’re going to end up with a far better consumer experience when those apps are combined by combining all of the program assets of both apps, both current apps, and obviously, with an improved consumer experience comes the ability to lower churn, which is obviously something that we’re very, very focused on and committed to doing. We obviously will deliver efficiencies.” He continued, “In addition to that, as it relates to content spend, I’d say that from a domestic perspective, you shouldn’t expect that we need to increase the spend on content significantly. Where we believe we should be investing is to grow our international businesses. Disney has been experimenting with the apps to figure out what works."

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A promo image of the Disney Adventure cruise ship — Image Source: Disneyphile

Outside of streaming, Disney is launching a new cruise ship in Singapore, the Disney Adventure. This comes after the company received a 8% increase in revenue, despite the opening of Epic Universe, and a 13% increase in operating income. Iger said, “It’s a floating essentially ambassador for the Disney brand, because you’ve been on any one of our ships, particularly the new ones, we effectively use our IP built into the entire experience. And so I think this will create a great opportunity for us in Asia, but particularly in Southeast Asia.” It looks like smooth sailing for Disney through the next fiscal quarter, but markets are never entirely predictable.

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