Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay, so number two. Number two eventually becomes the most important of these three points is invest in technology. Rewind back to this point in time. I remember being a media investment banker at this time. Media companies were hating on technology companies. We just come out of the Napster era and now all the movie studios are worried about the same thing’s going to happen with video that happened to music. YouTube’s going to kill us and there’s all this pirated content. It’s all just crap and we hate these people. Bob instead says, “We needed to embrace technology to the fullest extent. First, by using it to enable the creation of higher quality products like Pixar, and then to reach more consumers in more modern, more relevant ways. From the earliest Disney years under Walt, technology was always viewed as a powerful storytelling tool. Now it’s time to double down on our commitment to doing the same thing. It was also becoming clear that while we were still and would remain primarily a content creator, the day would come when modern distribution would be an essential means of maintaining brand relevance. Disney Plus. Unless consumers have the ability to consume our content in more user-friendly, more mobile, more digital ways, our relevance would be challenged.” Again, this such a change. Remember the Disney Vault? Eisner-era Disney was all about protecting the content, limiting consumers access, only opening the halt at very specific moments of time. And then ESPN, back to getting $9 a month from the cable providers. This is super revolutionary here that Bob is espousing. He’s saying things like, “Nope. We’re eventually going to get rid of all that.” Yeah and he didn’t say it in so many words until August of 2017. There’s, “We’re going to use technology both for creating better content and enabling better distribution,” but the whole industry, for a while, thought that meant when things like Netflix emerge, we will be okay putting our stuff there. I don’t think anyone thought that it meant what ultimately happened with Disney Plus. Publicly, yeah, I think that’s true, but it’s a little unclear from the book. I think this was part of his original presentation to the board. He knew that the day was coming. Netflix didn’t even exist yet, but giving the clone of Netflix the right, where they had to own it themselves. The mindset of starting to build towards that started with Bob becoming CEO. The third point was grow globally. Again, it’s hard to remember now. Actually, for our international audience, it’s probably easy to remember. For all the IP of Disney and especially now, Marvel and Star Wars have universal worldwide appeal in every country and culture, Disney wasn’t that back then. It was an American company. They had Euro Disney but……

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