Disney Looks to Offload Television Assets as it Goes All-In on Streaming
By Movieguide® Contributor
Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that the company is delving deeper into streaming services, opening the door for some of its TV assets to be sold.
When Iger returned to the company in 2022, he was tasked with refocusing the company away from traditional television as millions of Americans cancel their cable subscriptions every year.
“After coming back, I realized the company is facing a lot of challenges, some of them self-inflicted,” Iger told David Faber at Allen & Co.’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“The challenges are greater than I had anticipated,” Iger later added. “The disruption of the traditional TV business is most notable. If anything, the disruption of that business has happened to a greater extent than even I was aware.”
The company is now sure that streaming is their long-term future and it is now considering what to do with its assets that remain on broadcast and cable television. Iger has opened the door for the company’s cable networks FX and NatGeo along with its broadcast group ABC to be sold as they are no longer “core to Disney.” ESPN, however, will be expanded as the company delves into live sports.
While the ESPN+ streaming service has been lackluster in the past, Iger wants to transform it into the primetime place for sports, as the ESPN cable network has so long been. To do so, the company hopes to expand into live sports and is currently looking for a strategic partner in this venture.
This could lead Disney to partner with other major streaming services such as Prime Video, YouTube TV, or Apple TV, all of which already have exclusive rights to live sports broadcasts. This potential partnership would expand Disney’s current live sports offering which is limited to Monday Night Football, which it acquired in 2021.
It appears that Disney will also buy the remaining stake in Hulu from Comcast – who currently owns 33% of the site.
Iger concluded that Disney is “better off having Hulu,” and plans to bring Hulu-exclusive content onto Disney+.
“The combination of those apps is designed to obviously help the [streaming] business become profitable,” Iger said.
