David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think that's the right way to phrase it. I mean, if you just do the very simple exercise of looking at who generates profits in the movie, TV, Hollywood landscape right now, it is Netflix, YouTube, and Disney generating the large profit streams. Yep. So Disney decides to launch Disney+. Bob and the board basically draw a line in the sand and they say, we are not going to just sit around and let ourselves get Netflixed like everyone else. We're going to stand and fight toe to toe. We are going to build our own direct-to-consumer streaming company. This goes back to Bob's priority number 2 in his strategy presentation to the board when he became CEO. And, like, look, this is totally laudable. It's also arguably necessary. I mean, without Disney+ and its own streaming service, Disney wouldn't have the ability to control discoverability of its films and shows. And, like, that's so important. You want to get people into the parks, they gotta interact with the IP and the characters. Yeah, it's funny. You and I sort of had this thesis coming in where you just keep the hundreds of millions of dollars that Netflix is paying you each year, and you keep putting your content on Netflix and other places, and everything downstream of that, all the consumer products and parks and everything, works better because you're spreading your content across the whole world.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.