Disney To Remove More Content From Its Streaming Platforms
During today’s quarterly financial results conference call, Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy announced that it would be removing some programming from its streaming platforms.
Disney is “in the process of reviewing the content on our DTC services to align with the strategic changes in our approach to content curation” and “will be removing certain content from our streaming platforms.”
Due to these removals, Disney expects to make a writedown in the third quarter of $1.5-$1.8 billion from removing the content. McCarthy also said “going forward we intend to produce lower volumes of content in alignment with this strategic shift.”
This shouldn’t be a huge surprise, as Disney has been removing content from Disney+ and Hulu for ages, but it’s never been mentioned in a financial results call.
There could be many reasons for this; it’s likely to reduce costs, such as paying residuals to its creators and talent, but probably more likely to lease out content to other platforms, to make more money. We probably won’t see major films and shows from Marvel, Star Wars, or Pixar to be removed, but with Hulu, it’s possible less popular content and maybe content that Disney doesn’t want on its combined app, which will bring together Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+.
I’d personally expect, the majority of these removals will be within Hulu, with its licensed content from other companies like NBC, Fox and others. Also removing content from Hulu that it maybe doesn’t want under the Disney brand.
Internationally, there have been hundreds of titles removed from Disney+ due to licensing, cancelled shows, and business decisions. As Disney is looking to make its streaming businesses more profitable, removals are likely to become much more common.
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Roger Palmer
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