News Josh D’Amaro Named Next CEO of The Walt Disney Company

[Disney Irish]

So if someone pays for D+ and Hulu using the unified D+ app, they are counted 2X as subscribers to D+?

Nope, they are counted as a bundle sub, ie 1 sub.

 

[monothingie]

I don't gauge value or growth based on the whims of analysts temper tantrums.

Go back 10 years. This isn't a startup. When stock hasn't even kept up with inflation over the past 10 years, there's more going on than an idiot analysts temper tantrums.

 

[monothingie]

What it is and has always been is the best replacement available to a dying segment.

That has consistently had lower margins than Linear...yeah best.

Streaming is the new cable, just with more steps and an app.

 

[AidenRodriguez731]

This is kind of a random thought, but now that he is CEO I took the time to watch a couple of D'Amaro's interviews / talks (there's surprisingly little out there, in this intrawebz era) and see what Reddit posters are saying. Previously I had a vague image of him as a corporate type following Iger around at events.

I have to say after, I actually really like him after learning more about him. I think he's the real deal, in terms of being a genuine open-minded creative and a warm person who seems to genuinely like other people. (A strange stance from my perspective, as I generally hiss at other people and scuttle back under my rock when I see them, but I appreciate that it's a good trait.)

That doesn't change the fact that he probably has a fairly narrow window to work with, in terms of the direction he can take Disney. I'm still anticipating mostly "this IP or that IP?", especially in the first few years. But I am happy that he seems like a really good guy.

I think D'Amaro is a really personable guy and I'm happy because I've liked almost everything he's worked on. I will say, it's telling that I was in AK at the time of the announcement of the CEO and overheard many cast members and fans being excited about the news and overheard a story or two of them meeting Josh and saying he was very humble and down to earth when speaking to them.

 

[monothingie]

Nope, they are counted as a bundle sub, ie 1 sub.

Nope - Subscribers to the Disney Bundle (Disney+, Hulu, and/or ESPN+) are counted as unique (separate) subscribers for each service in Disney's official subscriber metrics, rather than as a single bundled subscriber.

 

[Disney Irish]

Go back 10 years. This isn't a startup. When stock hasn't even kept up with inflation over the past 10 years, there's more going on than an idiot analysts temper tantrums.

As has been said many times (and discounted by you and others here) the stock is not a direct indication of the health of this or any other company. Its a indication of the analysts temper tantrums and mood, its why you can have wild swings in a stocks price without any real cause.

 

[monothingie]

We did and you didn’t follow through with citations, because you don’t have them. I was giving you an opportunity to see if you were in good faith mistaken or not. Tubi is 6 months younger than D+ if you want to ignore its pre-aqusition history.

It makes less, has a smaller subscriber base (despite being free), less revenue by almost a factor of five, smaller margins and smaller income by almost a factor of five.

What you were citing incorrectly was Murdoch statement that eventually he thinks they’ll have 20-25% margins, not that they currently do.

For the record, I think they’ve done a good job there too. But Disney’s streaming foray is ahead of them on every metric. And even when they achieve 20-25% margins? Tubi makes 250M a quarter - down the road. Disney already is reaching 500M today. Scale matters and there is a reason everyone has suddenly defaulted to percentages and margins, because you’ve gradually lost the predictive battle with @Disney Irish and I.

Tubi grew their subscriber base by 80M in less than 4 years and achieved profitability in that time.

 

[Disney Irish]

Nope - Subscribers to the Disney Bundle (Disney+, Hulu, and/or ESPN+) are counted as unique (separate) subscribers for each service in Disney's official subscriber metrics, rather than as a single bundled subscriber.

Please show from the financials where they are reported as a sub for each, ie as unique subs.

 

[Dranth]

That has consistently had lower margins than Linear...yeah best.

Streaming is the new cable, just with more steps and an app.

That is what a new venture does, it loses money until it either fails or starts to turn a profit. Focus then shifts to expansion and growing margins until it hits whatever cap the market will support. Starting something and it being instantly profitable almost never happens, let alone with a high margin.

It just seems unrealistic to expect them to have and then judge them against Netflix like numbers in year six vs. year 19.

 

[monothingie]

Please show from the financials where they are reported as a sub for each, ie as unique subs.

Disney Advertising Shares Ad-Supported Monthly Active Users (MAU) & Methodology | The Walt Disney Company

thewaltdisneycompany.com

Note the term use of the term "without DeDuplication".

 

[BrianLo]

Tubi grew their subscriber base by 80M in less than 4 years and achieved profitability in that time.

Correction

Tubi: 22 quarters (5.5 years) on those metrics.
Disney+: 18.5 quarters, 117M subscribers for D+ sans hotstar.

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

Also an X and I agree.

The real danger they are in here is one of good will of which pricing is certainly a part. That good will is where I want Josh to focus as I think his hands will be tied on the pricing side. Just give us some good across the board wins, even if it is small stuff.

The model is the model…

A huge mistake that won’t be fixed easily was ole big shot trying for 10 years to “reinvent” the model.

It hasn’t worked. So now a dead end idea has to be “fixed”

They have to figure out how to make their costs more relatable and palatable as compared to cost of living and other concerns.

And that won’t be easy…because tweedle and Deedle sold Wall Street that they had “outgrown that”. In other news: Dewey beats Truman

 

[Disney Irish]

Disney Advertising Shares Ad-Supported Monthly Active Users (MAU) & Methodology | The Walt Disney Company

thewaltdisneycompany.com

Note the term use of the term "without DeDuplication".

That is a press release on active users and how they are calculated for the ad support, not the actual number of subs.

Also its a year old at this point.

 

[Disney Analyst]

Josh was in Disneyland this morning mingling it seems. And possibly Bob also.

 

[SamusAranX]

And where was Netflix's margin at the same point in its life cycle? For the first 6 years of the streaming service's life it was under 10% margins. That's right about the same as Disney DTC today. So again there is no reason to think that Disney DTC can't produce the same margins as Netflix in the near future.

Netflix’s ability to create an almost steady stream of original content, and then hitting a good batting average on the percentage of that content that became popular, is what led to that.

D+ needs to improve on that, drastically, if it wants to rocket upward.

ST5 was so popular Netflix crashed from the amount of people trying to watch. When is the last time D+ released a new series that compelled people to say “I need to sign up to watch X and Y”?

 

[Sirwalterraleigh]

Josh was in Disneyland this morning mingling it seems. And possibly Bob also.

Guess they couldn’t find anyone to attend a meeting about nothing instead?

 

[DisneyHead123]

I think D'Amaro is a really personable guy and I'm happy because I've liked almost everything he's worked on. I will say, it's telling that I was in AK at the time of the announcement of the CEO and overheard many cast members and fans being excited about the news and overheard a story or two of them meeting Josh and saying he was very humble and down to earth when speaking to them.

Yeah, I feel bad that I pre-judged him without realizing it. If he can keep something of that spirit alive amidst the stress of his new job, I could actually see him trying some cautiously (cautiously) new directions after his first few years.

 

[Lilofan]

You can certainly gauge the excitement on that anemic growth based on the stock price.

And Iger in 24’ earned $41 million which included $18 million in stock awards. Go figure.

 

[MrPromey]

And that might be, but if the middle or lower class isn't spending on travel for whatever reasons you can't just stick your head in the sand and pretend its not happening. So yeah while it might have been built on repeat visits, primarily on the backs of the middle class, its not likely to be maintained on the same in the future. And now the immediate argument will be "but they've priced out the lower and middle class", and the rebuttal to that is that was already happening before Disney ever increased prices. The middle class has been shrinking for decades, and the lower class was never really spending on Disney vacations anyways beyond a once in a lifetime trip (the same you claim the Disney model wasn't built for). So its a consumer base that was never going to be maintained long term anyways. So what do you do, try to maintain a shrinking consumer base or go after the ones who are actually spending money on travel? As a business owner you have to go where the money is with the consumers actually spending not try to maintain a shrinking consumer base.

I must have missed the before times when Disney wasn't increasing prices. When was that era again?

 

[MrPromey]

And where was Netflix's margin at the same point in its life cycle? For the first 6 years of the streaming service's life it was under 10% margins. That's right about the same as Disney DTC today. So again there is no reason to think that Disney DTC can't produce the same margins as Netflix in the near future.

Apples to oranges. They were also, at the same time, literally inventing the market (positioning themselves as an add to people with cable rather than a cord-cutter solution) and tech while spinning down their disk-by-mail offerings with incredibly limited streaming original content and working to improve less than optimum third party content.

By the time Disney launched plus, they'd had their finger in the Hulu pie for nearly 15 years and had already been licensing content and IP to Netflix so they weren't exactly navigating uncharted waters.