Disney Streaming Turn Is Telling…
Several years ago, The Walt Disney Family Museum’s Keith Gluck posted:
[In the late 1940s] Walt’s interest in television began to develop. In 1948 he spent a week in New York with the specific purpose of watching and learning more about television. By the time he returned to the Studio, he was convinced it was just the forum to help promote his work. He even told Studio Nurse Hazel George, “Television is the coming thing.” While other movie studios were trying to think of ways to thwart the coming of television, Walt was gearing up to embrace it… Walt Disney’s courage and vision are just two of the things that set him apart as a pioneer in the field of entertainment. By embracing television while his peers rejected it, he not only saw the realization of one of his biggest dreams, but he also set the foundation for what would become decades of quality family broadcasting.
So, when I read FastCompany’s “Why Disney’s dramatic pivot to streaming is a wake up call for business leaders” I am not surprised.
A Switch To Streaming
While I remain somewhat concerned about what the turn to a more streaming-specific business has on the Disney Parks, I am very excited to see The Walt Disney Company embrace new technology.
And as far as I am concerned as a more-than-casual Disney observer, I think Disney should more often seek to lead the pack; to set trends, rather than follow.
This forward-thinking and work toward building a new business model seems to be in the mode of how Walt Disney thought during the advent of television.
Thinking About Disney+
Hamza Mudassir, in Fast Company, wrote:
From a corporate strategy perspective, the move is remarkable on two fronts. Firstly, the sheer velocity of this pivot for a company the size and age of Disney is, for lack of a better word, unprecedented.
Let’s not forget that it was just last year that Disney held a near 40% revenue share of the US box office, thanks to Marvel films becoming a cultural phenomenon in the past decade. The company’s theme park and cruise line business was equally successful, with a year on year growth rate at a respectable 6% and revenues of $26.2 billion in the same period.
These are significant enterprises by any measure, with Disney enjoying deep competitive advantages in each of the sectors it participates in. In fact, before this announcement, most stock market analysts had made peace with the fact that Disney was likely to hunker down and wait for the pandemic to pass instead of changing gears. After all, why should the company leave money on the table if the pandemic was going to be over soon?
California Is Concerning
However, and this seems borne out by the continued closure of the California theme parks and news stories from around the United States, the pandemic and its effects are not ending anytime soon.
Mudassir added:
The fact that in just seven months of the pandemic breaking out, Disney decided to reinvent itself primarily around streaming speaks volumes about its expectations regarding the pandemic length. Clearly the group decided that waiting it out was no longer an option.
And the fabulously-written article ended:
Chef Gusteau in the Disney movie Ratatouille once said: “If you focus on what you left behind, you will never be able to see what lies ahead.” This seminal line seems more relevant now than ever before.
And I will say that reading the piece had me feeling more optimistic about The Walt Disney Company in some time.