The Walt Disney Company is in the midst of its third year under a strategic restructuring under chief executive officer Bob Iger, separating its company into three distinctive business segments. The media conglomerate continues to innovate amid the dynamic media ecosystem, focusing resources on streaming initiatives such as the ESPN Flagship direct-to-consumer platform and a new venture granting it 70% ownership over Fubo. The company reported a proliferation in overall revenues and total segment operating income for the quarter, along with $228 million in operating income at ESPN.
Dana Walden, the co-chairman of Disney Entertainment at The Walt Disney Company, recently participated in a question-and-answer session at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. Walden, who is responsible for leading brands and businesses such as ABC Entertainment and Disney Branded Television, also has a shared oversight towards the direct-to-consumer group within the company. Within her appearance, she was asked about the significance of the new ESPN Flagship platform coming to market and what it means for the business.
“I’ve seen a little bit, it’s incredibly exciting,” Walden said. “The new features that they’ll bring to market with the launch of Flagship, I think are really going to blow people away. From a Disney+ perspective though, sports is the biggest, most successful form of entertainment right now.”
Walden explained that the company recently launched an ESPN tile on Disney+ for its standalone subscribers that includes more than 3,000 hours of long-form programming. On top of that, the company recently launched SC+, a daily version of SportsCenter exclusive to Disney+ subscribers. As a whole, she observed that ESPN is helping drive more subscribers to upgrade into the trio bundle that also includes Hulu and ESPN+, along with generating more engagement with this type of content.
“It is going to help us, I think, to include people who are casual sports fans in this conversation that is obviously dominating cultures around the world and again a daily touchpoint for sports on Disney+,” Walden said of the SC+ enterprise, “a reason every day to open the app to check out what are the top 10 moments in sports and then allow the algorithm to surface to those subscribers other content that they’re going to engage with.”
Walden also acknowledged the progress Disney has made pertaining to streaming and how the company is now profitable in this regard, recently reporting $293 million in profit for Disney+ and Hulu in its fiscal first quarter. Moreover, she articulated how it begins with excellence in storytelling and discovering the best way to compile the portfolio it has across a variety of genres. For example, Hulu content can now be accessed within the Disney+ application, streamlining the overall consumption experience and integrating programming across multiple platform.s
“It’s an extraordinary value for subscribers, it’s driving engagement, it is improving our churn dynamic, and that in itself is cause for extreme optimism about our future,” Walden said, “but it’s also, again, continuing to deliver.”
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