Comcast did drive up the cost of Fox.
But Disney returned the favor and bid up the cost of Sky, which Comcast bought.
They raised the bid by $3.2B. That's a big difference from the $20B that Comcast drove up the price for Disney to purchase 21CF.
And now that Sky was overpriced, Disney sold their share of the overpriced Sky to Comcast.
In the end, after buying Fox, Disney got $40M out of divestitures, drastically reducing the cost of Fox.
You seem to gloss over the $20B premium paid on top of the original deal as it was insignificant. I'm not sure how you get $40B from divestitures when it seemed to only total $15B with the majority of that coming from the sale of the Fox RSNs.
Disney kept Fox out of competitors' hands. And transformed D+ content from "family" to "general audience" allowing them to set a new sub target after blowing through the first target in a manner of months. And Disney met their goal of when D+ would be profitable.
This is misleading. The "General Audience" (Adult) programing is what Hulu brought to table and D+ was never intended to go down that route.
You keep going back to the timeline developed at launch that D+ would be profitable by 2024 but there is so much context missing from that assessment.
1. There was never consideration of relying on an ad supported model.
2. There was never consideration of complete HULU integration.
3. The expected profits were going to be many times what is being realized now or even being forecast.
4. There was no expectation that the losses would have been so large. (They were basically blowing up a fleet of DCL cruise ships a year at the height of their losses.)
In a competitive market, you're not going to have fantastical win after win. Even Netflix, the front runner, had a live-action streaming debacle. But that's not going to sink Netflix. And Disney isn't going to sink with several minor setbacks.
D+ main challenge is going to be user churn and loss of retail subscribers via the constant price increases. If Bob's hot mic comment about ad-tier subscribers is accurate, then they are apparently underperforming in this subscriber segment.
The "success" of DTC for Disney has not come from putting out a good product with good content, but rather through acquisitions, price increases, password crackdowns, and introducing an ad-supported tier. Like the experiences segment which showed growth mostly through price increases, is that truly a sustainable path?
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