The AFL-CIO is pushing for Disney and Apple to explain how they use artificial intelligence.
The agreement, struck in September after a blackout, pulls some of Disney’s streaming services into the linear bundle.
With the 10th edition of the College Football Playoff set to cap off a high-rated season starting on New Year’s Day, Disney says advertising inventory is nearly sold out for the semifinals and championship. The level of buy-in is a welcome development for Disney as a challenging 2023 winds to a close. This season’s viewership surge precedes the expansion of the CFP field and negotiations for new media rights deal
Disney said in a lawsuit filed Friday that the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, often referred to as CFTOD, has been so slow in fulfilling its public records duties that it has failed to respond completely to a request the company made seven months ago when it paid more than $2,400 to get emails and text messages belonging to the five district board members appointed by Gov Ron DeSantis.
The mega-merger will enable Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries to create the country’s largest media and entertainment business.
James Gorman, who will step aside as CEO of Morgan Stanley at the end of this year after overseeing what is widely regarded as a carefully-planned succession process at the investment bank, will officially join Disney’s board in February. And he says he intends to be involved in Disney’s succession planning, finding a suitable person to follow Bob Iger. In an exit interview with CNBC Thursday, Gorman said that he will be joining Disney’s special succession committee when he officially joins the board next year.
Exclusives
A Manhattan jury found Majors, 34, guilty of one misdemeanor assault charge and one harassment violation stemming from his March confrontation with then-girlfriend Grace Jabbari. She said he attacked her in a car and left her in “excruciating” pain; his lawyers said Jabbari was the aggressor. Marvel and Disney immediately dropped the Creed III star from all upcoming projects following the conviction, said a person close to the studio. (Seth Wenig/AP)
There was a time when streamers — led by Netflix, burning a hole in its balance sheet with annual negative cash flow in the billions — were banking on double-digit subscriber growth. And they were spending on content like there was no tomorrow. Well, tomorrow came.
Disney has formally responded to activist shareholder Trian Fund Management’s unsolicited nominations of Trian chief Nelson Peltz and former Disney CFO James Rasulo to the media giant’s board of directors. The company acknowledged the nominations and also noted that Trian has teamed up with former Marvel Entertainment boss Ike Perlmutter. The executive was pushed out of the company years ago by CEO Bob Iger. Rasulo at one time was considered a potential successor to Iger. His run as an executive lasted from 1986 to 2015, the last five of those years as CFO. He had also served a stint as Chairman of the company’s Parks and Resorts division.
X boss Elon Musk called on Disney to “immediately” fire CEO Bob Iger on Thursday for allowing Mouse House ads to run on rival social media platforms that allegedly allowed child predators to target underage users. Musk’s escalated his feud with Iger — whom he told to “go f–k yourself” last week after Disney pulled its advertising from X — following a disputed report that its ads were running next to antisemitic content on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Disney+’s Loki ascended to the top of Nielsen’s U.S. ranking of streaming originals for the week of Nov. 6, amassing 753 million minutes viewed across 12 total episodes. Netflix’s All the Light We Cannot See dipped to a close second, with 744 million minutes viewed/four episodes.
Disney+ Officially Adds Hulu In Beta Launch Of ‘One-App Experience’; Full Rollout Set For March 2024
Disney has added Hulu as a sixth vertical on the home screen of Disney+, with the integrated “one-app experience” officially launching today in beta. Plans call for the full rollout of the combined app next March. The launch scheme, initially announced last month during Disney’s quarterly earnings call, comes as Disney is in the process of buying out Comcast’s one-third stake in Hulu and becoming its full owner.
Disney today named Hugh F. Johnston its new chief financial officer as of Dec. 4, replacing interim CFO Kevin Lansberry, who will return to his position as EVP and CFO of the company’s Experiences segment. The appointment of a new CFO fills a key leadership role as Disney faces a number of challenges, both financial and strategic.
The return of Loki to Disney+ didn’t cause quite as big a stir as the show’s debut. Season two of the Marvel series premiered Oct. 5, and it gathered 446 million minutes of viewing time over its first three days and change (it was released at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT Oct. 5 in the United States), according to Nielsen’s streaming rankings. That’s about 39% lower than the 731 million minutes of viewing for Loki’s series premiere week in June 2021.
One day after the Disney and Comcast co-owned streamer went on the market, Disney is buying the remaining 33% stake in Hulu for $8.61 billion. While there will be some hoops for Disney to jump through to complete the purchase, the company is predicting the deal will be completed “during the 2024 calendar year.”
Starting on Nov. 1, an option to begin the deal process for the 33% stake in the streaming platform — expected to be worth north of $9 billion — can be triggered.
Ferro says that 50% of new Disney+ subs are choosing the ad tier, as the company is set to launch it in global markets next month.
Comcast and Disney have hired investment banks to value Hulu, the next step in what’s been a nearly five-year process to put the streaming service under one owner. Comcast, which owns one-third of Hulu, has hired Morgan Stanley, and Disney, which owns the other two-thirds, has hired JPMorgan Chase. Each bank is tasked with providing a fair value for Hulu — a condition of an agreement set up in 2019 that allows either Disney or Comcast to trigger an option forcing Disney to buy Comcast’s 33% stake.
Net-net, Charter will be paying more to Disney, with the increase in wholesale fees for streaming exceeding cuts in payments for cable networks that are being dropped, most analysts have concluded. MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman looked at the Charter deal and has tried to game out how a similar deal would work out for other media companies.
The company to become the latest streamer to lift fees; Disney weighs launching a new live-sports tier abroad.
New account-sharing rules for the streaming platform are set to take effect Nov. 1 north of the U.S. border, with U.S. subscriber agreements to be updated later this year.
Charter CEO Chris Winfrey indicated that little progress has been made in the week-long carriage fight with Disney and said a leaner, ESPN-free TV bundle “could stick” with price-sensitive Spectrum customers. The exec updated investors on the epic distribution battle during a keynote session at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Tech Conference in San Francisco. “If I had anything material to highlight, I would,” he said of the negotiations. “So that should tell you something.”
Disney has seen a 60% jump in Hulu + Live TV subscriptions relative to internal expectations since a carriage impasse with Charter began, according to figures provided to Deadline by a Disney spokesperson. Last Thursday, 18 of Disney’s cable networks and eight ABC stations went dark on Charter’s Spectrum service in one of the most contentious and consequential TV carriage disputes in memory.
Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish said the Disney-Charter carriage dispute took a “notable” financial toll on many pay-TV stakeholders, but he touted his efforts to “modernize” the company’s distribution relationships for the streaming era. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Tech Conference, Bakish said last Friday was “obviously a notable day for the industry.” That was the first trading day after 18 Disney cable networks and eight ABC stations went dark on Charter’s Spectrum TV service. It brought a collective $15 billion hit to the market value of a number of programmers and operators, Bakish estimated, as the carriage impasse “was interpreted as a negative” by investors. Nevertheless, he continued, “all companies are not of the same point of view” when it comes to co-ordinating their efforts across linear TV, streaming and other lines of business.
The suit argues Charter consumers are essentially being held hostage by the cable powerhouse, which is looking to change the economics of pay TV.
After pushing back his retirement four times, Bob Iger finally made the leap. On Feb. 25, 2020, he announced he would step down as Disney’s CEO. His hand-picked successor, Bob Chapek, then Disney’s parks chairman, would take over the day-to-day job of running the company, effective immediately. As part of the changing of the guard, the Disney board suggested the new CEO should take over Iger’s expansive office at Disney headquarters in Burbank, California. There was just one problem. Iger had no interest in moving out.
Wall Street analysts say that the rift can result in a migration of subscribers and could even tip Hollywood’s power structure.
Comcast and Disney have modified their Hulu agreement to enable the expected buyout of Comcast’s one-third stake in the streamer to begin on September 30 instead of next January. The news was shared at a Goldman Sachs conference appearance by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, who said the initial minimum valuation of $27.5 billion for Hulu agreed to in 2019 was “just a hypothetical.” He suggested the final price tag could be much higher. Roberts said both companies “wanted to get this behind us,” so they reached an agreement last week to accelerate the timeline.
The Disney-Charter carriage battle is foregrounding the fragility of the pay-TV bundle. Charter’s Spectrum TV service is in its fifth day of darkness as the companies fight over carriage terms, leaving nearly 15 million customers without access to 18 Disney networks, including ESPN, as well as eight ABC stations.
Whoopi Goldberg was absent from the Season 27 premiere episode of The View today due to yet another case of Covid, though many usual viewers throughout the country will miss the show too: The View did not air today in markets impacted by the ongoing clash between Disney and Spectrum. In New York City, for example, where the daytime series originates, viewers attempting to tune into the show were greeted with the same Spectrum message that’s been on the ABC affiliate channel all weekend: “The Walt Disney Company, owner of this channel, has removed their programming from Spectrum,” the message begins. “We offered Disney a fair deal, and yet they continue to demand an excessive increase.”
The battle between Charter Communications and Walt Disney, spurred due to cord-cutting, is now getting very tangled. Charter suggested last week that it might be ready to cut Disney networks from its programming lineup after the two companies reached an impasse in talks to extend their carriage contract. Now Disney is hinting to Charter subscribers that they might want to cut their connection with the large cable distributor.
Is ABC Really For Sale?
A tipping point for the broadcast industry is coming, and part of it hinges on a problem that Disney chief Bob Iger created for himself.
Shares of several big media and entertainment companies tumbled Friday as investors considered the potential fallout from an impasse between cable giant Charter Communications and media titan Walt Disney Co. On Thursday, Disney said it had pulled major networks such as ESPN and ABC from Charter systems after the two companies could not come to terms on a renewal of their carriage license. Charter’s systems reach a little under 15 million subscribers in markets that include New York City and Los Angeles.
Addressing Thursday night’s carriage impasse with Disney, Charter Communications executives told Wall Street investors on a conference call today that their linear video business is “at the edge of a precipice.” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said any resolution to the outage, which left almost 15 million customers in the dark at the start of football season, would need to happen quickly. Otherwise, he said, Charter will take pains to preserve broadband relationships with customers who drop video service.
ESPN and 18 other Disney networks as well as ABC stations have gone dark across Spectrum, the No. 2 cable TV service in the U.S. Charter Communications, which runs Spectrum, and Disney had been locked in a distribution dispute since well before the U.S. Open tennis tournament began this week. In the coming days, college football and the NFL will kick off, potentially putting two massive sports properties on the list of programming unavailable to Spectrum customers. Along with the ESPN family of networks, the carriage fight also involves FX and a number of non-sports networks as well as ABC stations.
Remi Yamamoto, who most recently served as special assistant to President Biden and senior advisor for the White House chief of staff, has joined Disney Entertainment Television as vice president, Media Relations. She will report directly to Naomi Bulochnikov-Paul, EVP Publicity, and Head of Communications for Disney Entertainment Television. (Image: ABC/Michael Kirchoff)
Verizon is the latest player to have discussions with Disney about ESPN’s future. Disney has had preliminary talks with Verizon focused on creating a new ESPN streaming service. Verizon is already a key distributor for Disney, with deals that include a current one offering the Disney bundle (Disney+, Hulu with ads and ESPN+ with ads) for a discounted $10 per month to Verizon MyPlan customers.
