You UNI fanbois are starting to give JT and Jimmy a run for their money. Comcast is a fine company and in the P&R arena is kicking TWDC's tush all over the playground. But y'all are really going to argue for the medium or long term viability of the Comcast cable model (and by extension it's ISP business)? What do you call the UNI equivalent of pixie dust? Potter poots?
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Disney and Universal: Two very different paths
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Captain Chaos
Well-Known Member
Floo powder?
flynnibus
Premium Member
and why do you think the cable companies are so heavily involved in internet access and the whole content over IP game? Making sure they don't get left behind when people drop regular cable and go 'cord cutter'. You may not be buying Comcast cable access - but you're now Comcast's internet customer. The game shifts... but comcast is still entrenched just as much as they were before with their right of ways and infrastructure lead.
StageFrenzy
Well-Known Member
Wand Stroker
Jimmy Thick
Well-Known Member
Er, um...
Has Disney Beaten Time Warner and Comcast for Good?
By Dan Caplinger | More Articles
November 5, 2013 | Comments (0)
Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS ) will release its quarterly report on Thursday, and investors couldn't be happier after having seen shares of the media giant climb to all-time record highs. With such a larger stable of businesses under its corporate umbrella, Disney's content-producing movie and television media holdings have put Time Warner (NYSE: TWX ) and Comcast's (NASDAQ: CMCSA ) NBC Universal to shame recently. Can Disney keep the good times going?
Disney's empire spans across many parts of the entertainment industry, with its theme parks and cruise ships providing venues for entertainment while its ESPN and ABC television networks produce content alongside its lucrative film division. As Disney has made smart strategic acquisitions, especially in the movie-studio arena, it has only underlined the rising value of its content library. At least for now, that strategy appears to have worked well, as demand for high-quality content keeps growing. Let's take an early look at what's been happening with Disney over the past quarter and what we're likely to see in its report.
Stats on Disney
Analyst EPS Estimate
$0.76
Change From Year-Ago EPS
11.8%
Revenue Estimate
$11.40 billion
Change From Year-Ago Revenue
5.7%
Earnings Beats in Past 4 Quarters
3
Source: Yahoo! Finance.
Can Disney keep knocking it out of the theme park?Analysts have had narrowly mixed views about Disney earnings recently, cutting their September-quarter projections by a penny per share but boosting their fiscal 2014 estimates by the same amount. The stock has continued to rise, with gains of more than 3% since early August.
Disney actually disappointed investors early in the quarter, with somewhat sluggish growth weighing on its June-quarter results. Even the release of Iron Man 3 wasn't enough to produce gains in studio revenue given last year's success of The Avengers, although theme parks and cable networks picked up the slack and pulled Disney to an overall 4% gain in total revenue. Disney's poor showing also reflected the disastrous flop of The Lone Ranger, for which the company expected a loss of $150 million to $200 million.
Yet Disney remains well ahead of most of its multimedia rivals, including Comcast and Time Warner. ESPN has continued to drive results for Disney's cable operations, acting as the anchor for many cable-operators' lineups and commanding huge pricing power as a result. Rival sports networks from Fox and NBC are seen as competitors, but they only earn about 5% to 7% the monthly subscriber fees that ESPN pulls in for Disney. New success from its Disney Infinity video game has driven not only direct sales of the game but also the add-on figures that enhance the playing experience, proving the value of having integrated divisions working in concert to maximize profit.
Still, the most obvious high-potential area for Disney remains content creation, where the powerful combination of Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel continue to create seemingly unlimited opportunities for long-lived franchises. With the new television series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." expected to integrate with various Avengers-related franchises, including the most recent Thor: The Dark World movie release, Disney is only beginning to unlock the multimedia value of its content acquisitions.
In the Disney earnings release, watch to see how effectively the company can continue to ramp up its content-production machine without sacrificing quality. Inevitable flops will happen, but without Time Warner or Comcast tapping into more successful content production of their own, Disney will continue to have the field almost to itself.
http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...-beaten-time-warner-and-comcast-for-good.aspx
Funny how some people just need to try to make ESPN seem just so insignificant.
* Jimmy chuckles *
Jimmy Thick- Happy holidays everyone, God bless and may you all be safe and happy!!!
Has Disney Beaten Time Warner and Comcast for Good?
By Dan Caplinger | More Articles
November 5, 2013 | Comments (0)
Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS ) will release its quarterly report on Thursday, and investors couldn't be happier after having seen shares of the media giant climb to all-time record highs. With such a larger stable of businesses under its corporate umbrella, Disney's content-producing movie and television media holdings have put Time Warner (NYSE: TWX ) and Comcast's (NASDAQ: CMCSA ) NBC Universal to shame recently. Can Disney keep the good times going?
Disney's empire spans across many parts of the entertainment industry, with its theme parks and cruise ships providing venues for entertainment while its ESPN and ABC television networks produce content alongside its lucrative film division. As Disney has made smart strategic acquisitions, especially in the movie-studio arena, it has only underlined the rising value of its content library. At least for now, that strategy appears to have worked well, as demand for high-quality content keeps growing. Let's take an early look at what's been happening with Disney over the past quarter and what we're likely to see in its report.
Stats on Disney
Analyst EPS Estimate
$0.76
Change From Year-Ago EPS
11.8%
Revenue Estimate
$11.40 billion
Change From Year-Ago Revenue
5.7%
Earnings Beats in Past 4 Quarters
3
Source: Yahoo! Finance.
Can Disney keep knocking it out of the theme park?Analysts have had narrowly mixed views about Disney earnings recently, cutting their September-quarter projections by a penny per share but boosting their fiscal 2014 estimates by the same amount. The stock has continued to rise, with gains of more than 3% since early August.
Disney actually disappointed investors early in the quarter, with somewhat sluggish growth weighing on its June-quarter results. Even the release of Iron Man 3 wasn't enough to produce gains in studio revenue given last year's success of The Avengers, although theme parks and cable networks picked up the slack and pulled Disney to an overall 4% gain in total revenue. Disney's poor showing also reflected the disastrous flop of The Lone Ranger, for which the company expected a loss of $150 million to $200 million.
Yet Disney remains well ahead of most of its multimedia rivals, including Comcast and Time Warner. ESPN has continued to drive results for Disney's cable operations, acting as the anchor for many cable-operators' lineups and commanding huge pricing power as a result. Rival sports networks from Fox and NBC are seen as competitors, but they only earn about 5% to 7% the monthly subscriber fees that ESPN pulls in for Disney. New success from its Disney Infinity video game has driven not only direct sales of the game but also the add-on figures that enhance the playing experience, proving the value of having integrated divisions working in concert to maximize profit.
Still, the most obvious high-potential area for Disney remains content creation, where the powerful combination of Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel continue to create seemingly unlimited opportunities for long-lived franchises. With the new television series "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." expected to integrate with various Avengers-related franchises, including the most recent Thor: The Dark World movie release, Disney is only beginning to unlock the multimedia value of its content acquisitions.
In the Disney earnings release, watch to see how effectively the company can continue to ramp up its content-production machine without sacrificing quality. Inevitable flops will happen, but without Time Warner or Comcast tapping into more successful content production of their own, Disney will continue to have the field almost to itself.
http://www.fool.com/investing/gener...-beaten-time-warner-and-comcast-for-good.aspx
Funny how some people just need to try to make ESPN seem just so insignificant.
* Jimmy chuckles *
Jimmy Thick- Happy holidays everyone, God bless and may you all be safe and happy!!!
WDWDad13
Well-Known Member
If they did that it would hurt comcast way more. You'd also see a lot of directv and dish network sign ups it would expect
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Exactly, Comcast also is one of the largest PHONE providers as well, Conventional cable is doomed eventually mainly because of the sheer greed of outfits like TWDC people keep cutting back on cable. So Comcast decided to become the biggest ISP in the land,
Comcast has a far more diversified revenue stream than TWDC, Their parks are effectively ADVERTISING for their creative divisions much like DL was in Walt's time.
The other interesting thing is the sheer number of cable channels that NBC/Universal owns. Was doing some work for them at Rockefeller Center and spending a bit of time in the Commissary where they have plaques up for each one and when they acquired them including most of the spanish language channels. This puts comcast at a significant advantage over Disney and TWC as they produce most of their lineup internally.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
The ISP business is a BETTER business than cable as well due to the high barriers to entry and once initial buildout is complete CAPEX is minimal and OPEX keeps decreasing over time.
Verizon VERY foolishly gave up on FiOS because the street liked the wireless business better and VZ still thinks that people are going to pay $10-20/Gb for Internet delivered over 4G LTE, Nyquist has something to say about that (physics) and economics people are NOT going to pay $10 bucks to stream a single HD movie. Sorry VZ bad move.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Trouble is ESPN for the last couple of years is declining in percentage of total sports viewers, They are still the big dog in sports media but they are on a downward trajectory, Looks like the Iger 'Inverse Midas Touch' is hard at work again.
http://www.businessinsider.com/two-charts-that-show-why-espn-should-be-very-scared-2013-11
englanddg
One Little Spark...
Well, perhaps they should spend more time actually showing sports, rather than analyzing everything to death.
Nope. It was after one branch (and a light pole) fell onto the Everest ride track during 3rd shift. The knee jerk reaction was to remove anything that could somehow do the same to an attraction elsewhere.
Not that there were many attractions to worry about
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Nope. It was after one branch (and a light pole) fell onto the Everest ride track during 3rd shift. The knee jerk reaction was to remove anything that could somehow do the same to an attraction elsewhere.
Not that there were many attractions to worry about
Idiots - of course the endemic lack of maintenance contributed there, If anyone had been doing detailed routine inspections instead of a cursory walk of the track they would have found the rotted bamboo and removed it
sshindel
The Epcot Manifesto
This I 100% agree with. Their ISP presence is going to increasingly become their main point of business in the distribution area. And to be clear, I was not actually trying to compare Comcast vs. Disney as companies or their business models. I was simply trying to discuss the dependence between Comcast as a distribution channel vs. Disney as a content provider. I don't feel that, in this business relationship, that Comcast would have the upper-hand if they decided to cut all ties to Disney and drop them from their cable networks. I feel that Comcast would be far worse affected if that business relationship were to end and Comcast tried to drop Disney. Disney would be hurt, and likely hurt badly, but I think that the impact felt on Comcast's end if they told their customers that they were no longer going to get anything in the ABC/Disney/ESPN family of channels would be much more devastating.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
I'm fan of Comcast as a BUSINESS, Don't visit their parks and coming d--n close to not visiting Disney's anymore either. It's not a popular opinion here but I think TWDC is heading for a fall.
We have a winner!
flynnibus
Premium Member
It's a symbiotic relationship... the kind you often see in businesses where even 'enemies' need each other to function. Both know they can't survive without the other... so they work together, even grudgingly .. while constantly trying to find ways to redefine the game to not be dependent. Both sides know they need each other today... it's just a question of just how far one is willing to push it and who gets bloodied in the fight when they screw their customers in the battle.
Customers have such little insight into the content/distributor relationship that it really becomes a battle of PR.
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
Very true
ford91exploder
Resident Curmudgeon
But in many cases the only option for the customers would be to 'embrace the suck' as Comcast is the only cable provider in many markets and satellite is not practical for many customers.
Trouble is for Disney with the exception of ESPN they have no compelling cable properties, The Disney $SOMETHING is just background noise nothing there that's compelling to watch, All the classic Disney stuff is gone used to love the 'Ink and Paint Club', They made the extremely foolish decision to cancel 'Extreme Makeover - Home Edition' yes I know that was expensive to produce but a HUGE audience watched it and it was the anchor for ABC's Sunday programming.
ABC is so far behind in the ratings war it's not funny and the Katie Couric disaster well what more needs to be said her old network was so happy she was gone to become ABC's albatross. And even ESPN does not have as many games as they used to Fox is gobbling them up because ESPN is too cheap, It's a far cry from ABC's 'Wide World of Sports'. ESPN is largely a bunch of has-been athletes arguing about games.
Once again the Iger 'Inverse Midas Touch'
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MickeyPeace
Well-Known Member
No one being you.
sshindel
The Epcot Manifesto
True, but that is changing over time. More options will soon be available to everyone. The bonus of a company like Comcast is it's simplicity, and that'll keep a large portion of it's customer base, no matter how good/bad their service, price, or options are. It's "easy" to buy a bundle of cable/phone/internet. I know, because I am a
I just think that the current lay of the land, Comcast needs the content that Disney provides more than Disney needs the distribution channel, and I feel that it's currently skewing more and more towards Disney's side as time passes. Likely, it's just because I feel that the spin is easier on Disney's side. It's easy for them to point to similar content providers and the prices that they charge, and their per/customer "price" makes it an easier spin job than a company like Comcast to try and sell their customers on the idea that Disney charges outrageous prices. And that's just the spin, Disney likely does charge outlandish prices, and it's likely passed directly on to the customer, but in the press, that's all obfuscated because to the customer, it seems that Comcast is the ones raising prices.