Disney Executives Give Update On Recent Disney+ Features
Disney has released its latest quarterly results for the fiscal first quarter of 2025, and Disney’s CEO Bob Iger and CFO Hugh Johnston have revealed some details on how Disney+ and its overall streaming businesses are doing right now.
The company continues to build its streaming service, especially in terms of its main focus, profitablity, as its Direct-To-Consumer has improved, with nearly $300 million in operating income, representing an improvement of more than $430 million compared to QI last year.
In the past year, we’ve seen Disney+ in the United States get many new features, including the addition of “channels” and much more.
We expect engagement with the platform to grow over time given the global strength of our content and our focus on platform enhancements, including well received recent improvements like prominently showcasing our Top 10 series and movies, implementing further personalization features, and offering Streams — our programmed playlists on Disney+ that launched at the end of September that are driving engagement with curated content, such as high-interest live news events. This focus on platform enhancements remains one of our top priorities and will continue to expand as this year progresses.
But the biggest two additions for Disney+ is the addition of Hulu and ESPN content, which is helping push the streaming bundle:
In December we introduced an ESPN tile on Disney+. Like the successful launch of the Hulu tile on Disney+ earlier last year, the ESPN tile provides bundle subscribers access to the full range of ESPN+ sports content, while also making select ESPN content available to all Disney+ subscribers, including certain live sports events and games, studio shows, series, and documentaries. Early indications are encouraging — standalone Disney+ subscribers engaging with a sample of ESPN and Hulu content are more engaged than those yet to take advantage of the full breadth of our offer, reaffirming our belief in the power and value of aggregating our content and brands in one app.
Disney also confirmed that a brand new live Sports studio show called “SC+” will be coming to Disney+ later this year:
To that end, we are excited to add new live Sports studio shows that will be exclusive to Disney+ later this year, including a daily SportsCenter show called SC+. We are only months away from our launch of ESPN’s full suite of networks direct-to-consumer in early fall, which will also be made available on Disney+.
The addition of Hulu On Disney+ has been a huge hit for Disney, stating that over one billion hours of viewing since it launched last fiscal year, and over 50% of bundle subscribers are primarily using Disney+ as their app of choice.
Roger’s Take: It’s very clear that the future of Disney+ is the addition of Hulu and ESPN to offer a more broad choice of content and its already proving to be a big hit.
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