Some Disney Maths & More
Weekend Wrap Up Edition - Week 2/2025
The new year brings some changes to Streaming Made Easy with the launch of a premium version (Tuesdays Deep Dives), a new podcast (Pod Thursdays) and a free weekend edition (Weekend Wrap Up). Consider upgrading to the premium version with a 149.99€/year launch offer (instead of 179.99€) ↓
Now, onto this week's news...
🚨 What a start of the new year with this surprise announcement of a Disney / Fubo deal.
Much has been said about the impacts of that deal but there’s one element the media might have overlooked.
🎌 Crunchyroll’s manga add-on subscription
Loving Sony for bringing content related news to CES 🙏🏻
→ The pros: Deepen fan engagement → retention → addl revenues; differentiation to resist v/v Netflix and Disney’s thirst for anime; bundle opportunities.
→ The cons: Are we looking at 2 distinct products or a perfect integration of the 2? Exclusive titles to compete with Shonen Jump?
📺 CES From My Living Room
TV OS providers all made the trip to Vegas. At a time where we have more contenders fighting for the same pie, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall to hear the pitches to secure new TV OEM partners. Whale TV gave a sneak peek into their deal terms with manufacturers. TiVo announced its 1st US OEM partner. Roku goes higher end with its Pro Series line now available in stores. IMDb makes an entrance in the Roku ecosystem to bring more data to your shows & movies while Google TV brings Gemini AI in to feed you news (Google’s grip on news publishers just got tighter). Could Samsung have solved the need for content localization? Finally, a cool open source collab between two giants. Anything else caught your attention? Come share in the comment section.
🤳 While big media converged to Las Vegas, content creators were on their way to Dubai.
The 1B Followers Summits starts today. The CES of Social Media? Each platform will host its own dedicated space, bringing attendees sessions, interactive activities, and exclusive insights. I’ll be following the Content Creator sherpa to hear all about the event.
🔢 Who’s the biggest?
In a pre-upfront move, Roku, Tubi and Disney shared their latest reach numbers.
→ Roku gained 4.3M streaming households in Q4 2024 to top 90M within the 1st week of Jan (unclear what qualifies as an active streaming household). The last number we’ll get from them?
→ Tubi reached 97M MAUs (undefined).
→ Finally, after Iger’s slip up during their latest earnings:
“So right now, in the United States, about 60% of all new subs are going to—or are buying—our streaming services, advertising-supported or AVOD. I think right now, I think it’s 37% of total subs in the US are AVOD subs and 30% globally.”
Bob Iger – Chief Executive Officer, The Walt Disney Company
Disney announced they had 157M ad-supported users globally, including 112M domestically, on average per month over the last six months, and that behind an account they had an average 2.6 users, that an active user equals 10+ seconds of watch time. Some transparency, at last!
What are we looking at account wise?
157M MAUs / 2.6 users per account = 60.3M ad-supported accounts across the 3 brands.
45M users (excl. US) = 17.3M ad-supported accounts (26.9% of 🌎 subs)
112M users (US) = 43M ad-supported accounts 🇺🇸 How many are D+ only subs? Following Iger’s comment, 37% of 56M D+ subs so 15.9M? Hulu (52M subs) and ESPN+ (25.6M) are big ad vehicles, aren’t they? 27.1M ad-supported accounts to share between the two doesn’t track. What am I missing here? Thoughts?
🇪🇺 A quiet week on the European Media front
Except for another social media villain showing up his true face, threatening democracies and insulting our values and institutions on the way.
Well Zuck, here’s what Channel 4 has to say to you:
That’s it for today but before you go, tell me:
Now here comes 2025 and a new set of predictions to be made. Go check out the 1st 10 predictions we made with Evan on the 2nd episode of The Media Odyssey, our new podcast.
Enjoy your day and see you on Tuesday for the NEW Deep Dive edition of Streaming Made Easy Premium.