Disney+ To No Longer Provide Streaming Subscriber Number Updates

Today, Disney released its latest quarterly financial results, confirming that starting next year, it will no longer report the number of subscribers to its streaming services, including Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN.

This follows a similar strategy that Netflix has, which also stopped providing investors with subscriber numbers on a quarterly basis, since it’s less meaningful for evaluating its business.

Disney CEO Bob Iger and CFO Hugh Johnston said in a statement regarding the change:

“We are focused on managing our businesses to deliver growth in a sustained way, and to align our financial reporting with how we operate. Since we began reporting the number of paid subscribers and ARPU, our DTC strategy and the operating environment have evolved,”

While we won’t get regular updates on a quarterly basis, Disney will still provide “milestone” updates for when subscriber numbers hit specific milestones.

Disney is set to make significant changes to its streaming platforms. These changes include the merger of Hulu and Disney+, the launch of their new ESPN streaming service, and the eventual merger of ESPN+ into this new service. Additionally, the merger between Fubo TV and Hulu+Live TV is still in progress. There will likely be huge variations in subscribers as different assets are merged together, resulting in a drop in subscriber numbers as apps close off and merge together.

While streaming subscriber numbers were one of the key measuring points for how well a platform was performing, a few years ago, Wall Street decided that just having lots of subscribers alone wasn’t actually as important as making a profit, which is why all the major studios, including Disney, began drastically shifting their focus from attracting new subscribers, to making more money from its existing subscribers, with price hikes and cost cutting on new originals.

Some may be sceptical of the shift to no longer providing subscriber numbers, but it’s likely most other streaming platforms will do the same, once Netflix paved the way forward.

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