Disney’s streaming business is finally finding its footing
Disney made money off its streaming business for the second time in a row. During Q4 2024, profit from Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN Plus soared to $321 million, up from $47 million last quarter.
During an earnings call on Thursday, Disney CEO Bob Iger said around 60 percent of all new subscribers are choosing Disney Plus’s ad-supported plan. Meanwhile, 37 percent of total subscribers in the US are currently subscribed to the option, which has become a major revenue driver for streaming services.
“It’s not just about raising pricing,” Iger said. “It’s about moving consumers to the advertiser-supported side of the streaming platform… the pricing that we recently put into place, which is increased pricing, was actually designed to move more people in the AVOD [Advertising-based Video on Demand] direction.” Disney last raised prices across its streaming services in October.
More and more streaming services are breaking through the barrier of profitability — and staying there. For years, Netflix was the only streaming service that could reliably turn a profit, but now rivals are finally catching up. Along with Disney, Paramount Plus was recently profitable for the second consecutive quarter, while Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max continues to make money, too.
At the same time, Disney’s streaming business saw modest subscriber growth in the US and Canada, going from 54.8 million last quarter to 56 million. Additionally, Disney has plans to roll out password sharing more broadly, as CEO Bob Iger said during an earnings call that paid-sharing just started in Latin America this week. The company’s CFO Hugh Johnston didn’t rule out the possibility of price increases in the future, either.
We certainly look to continue to increase pricing in line with the value that we’re providing to consumers. A lot of the growth that we’re seeing right now is because of the exceptional content that’s coming out of both the movie and the TV studios that are that’s obviously our proprietary content, so that’ll certainly enable us to increase pricing over time.
The company has also announced that it will add an ESPN Plus tile to Disney Plus on December 4th, bringing “select” live games and studio programming to subscribers in the US. It brought Hulu to the Disney Plus app earlier this year.