Disney’s Big Emmy Wins May Build Streaming Momentum

Disney cleaned up at the 2024 Emmys on Sunday night, taking home nine trophies and giving the Bob Iger-run entertainment giant more ammunition in the streaming wars.

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While FX’s The Bear failed to win best comedy, it still won a slew of acting prizes, while the network’s Shogun landed best drama. The wins continue the trend set the prior week, when Disney took home a record 51 awards at the Creative Arts Emmys, including 14 won by Shogun .

The company is betting that the prestige and the spotlight the Emmys have shone on its biggest series on Hulu and Disney+ could help boost streaming subscriber numbers in the coming quarters, continuing a strategy Disney outlined last quarter as it looks for sustainable profitability in its streaming services.

In Disney’s most recent quarter, the company saw its Disney+ core subscribers (which does not include Hotstar) rise to 118.3 million , while Hulu subscribers rose by 2 percent to 46.7 million. In addition, Disney saw a profitable streaming quarter, ahead of guidance, and said it expects margins to improve even further in the fourth quarter.

At the time, executives attributed the profitability in the quarter, in part, to demand for content on the streaming platform, with Iger citing the company’s 183 Emmy nominations and shows such as Shogun, The Bear and Abbott Elementary. “What we’ve been seeing with streaming is significant success driven largely by the success of our creativity,” Iger said on the earnings call.

Iger also attended the Emmy Awards Sunday and doubled down on that message on the red carpet, where he praised executives at his company and their ability to work with creatives. “I’ve been in business for 50 years and I know that there’s nothing more important than a great creator and great creativity,” he said on the carpet.

But as Iger noted on the earnings call, the popularity of the content and the expected momentum from future content, including Inside Out 2 , also gives Disney pricing leverage. The company has already announced price increases, which will see the monthly cost of its Disney+ ad-supported and ad-free tiers increase by $2 each starting Oct. 17. The increases also make The Disney Bundle, which will offer the ad tiers of Disney+ and Hulu for $10.99 per month, just slightly more than paying for one stand-alone service.

At the same time, Disney announced a short-term, discounted price for its ad-tier on Sept. 12 in a push for subscribers in its fourth quarter. The company had long promised investors that its streaming service would be profitable as of the 2024 Q4.

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Disney is also in a close race with YouTube for market share of total TV usage. As of Nielsen’s latest Media Distributor Gauge, YouTube had overtaken Disney for the month but the studio conglomerate still leads for the year in total.

While Iger said the company typically only sees “modest churn” from price increases, bundling the services may also help cut down on the number of users canceling their accounts, and it fits into Disney’s priority of offering a “unified streaming” experience with a broader range of entertainment.

“The goal is to grow engagement on the platform, and what I mean by that is obviously offering a wider variety of programming, which is why we’re adding news, why we’re adding the ESPN tile to it, why we’re bundling aggressively to give consumers the ability to buy across all of our basically creative engines,” Iger said.

The company’s push toward profitability has also been helped by its password-sharing crackdown, which began in June, and to which Iger said the company has had “no backlash at all,” as well as its growing advertising tier.

While Disney says it has not seen much subscriber attrition from these initiatives, a Bank of America report from Aug. 27 found some “tentative signs” of a slowdown in spending on streaming in 2024, with year-over-year growth in the number of households with one or more streaming services also decelerating. This could reflect the maturity of the streaming market and the fact that the crackdown on password-sharing across services may have peaked.

But, overall the report finds that some consumers are “becoming more cost conscious and could be prepared to cut their streaming services or drop to ad-supported services more readily going forward.”

That’s where Disney’s prestige content, and discounts on the ad-tier, among other initiatives, could be key. And as Disney faces softness in parks attendance , which executives characterized as “a bit of a slowdown, that’s being more than offset by the entertainment business,” streaming profitability will be even more of a focus.

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