Credit: Inside the MagicDisney CEO Bob Iger has seen what rival company Netflix is doing by cracking down on users sharing passwords, and he is inspired.
Yesterday, the Walt Disney Company held its Q1 2024 earnings call, essentially breaking down how the company was doing on a financial level and presenting a slew of announcements about its future. While Bob Iger was a prominent voice on the call (along with Executive Vice President Alexia Quadrani and Chief Financial Officer Hugh Johnston), it was actually an interview with CNBC that the Disney CEO let it slip how much he was being influenced by one of his biggest competitors and their controversial money-saving moves.
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The Disney CEO admitted to CNBC that “Netflix had an over 10-year head start on us,” and that, for once, the iconic media company had been playing catch-up to another corporation. He continued, “We launched Disney streaming just over four years ago. It’s still a nascent business in many respects, very successful when you look at the number of global subs that we signed up right away and then obviously since then.”
That is an optimistic slant from Bob Iger, considering that the earnings call had lost 1.3 million Disney+ subscribers in the final quarter of 2023, largely over the rapidly inflating cost of the streaming service. But it appears that the Disney CEO was inspired by Netflix’s crackdown on password sharing, a longtime irritation toward companies looking to maximize streaming revenue.
Iger said, “[W]hen you think about Netflix and you think about what they have done on password sharing…their customer acquisition and retention costs, the technology they have that lowers churn, the global content that they have amassed including locally…All of those things are things that not only do we aspire to, but that we’re working toward in terms of delivering.”
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In other words, the Disney CEO has sized up Netflix and decided that the Mouse House needs to be doing exactly what it is doing, even if money-saving crackdowns on password sharing are so alienating to many subscribers that they are leaving in droves.
However, Bob Iger has made it clear that the Disney+ streaming service is the main priority for the company going forward, no matter how much money it loses in the short term. If he has to take unpopular tips from his rivals to keep it going, it sounds like that is what Iger will do.
How do you feel about Netflix and Disney cracking down on passwords? Let us know in the comments below!