Hollywood’s Pivot to Streaming 5 Years On: Fatal Error – or Key to Survival?

The big reveal of Disney’s leap into a streaming future came on April 11, 2019. 

On that day — seven months before the company launched Disney+ — executives gathered on the Disney studio lot in Burbank at their annual Investor Day and laid out their plans to Wall Street for how the entertainment giant was going to try to catch up to tech-entertainment company Netflix.

Wall Street was ascribing massive value to Netflix, a Silicon Valley creation, for the ballooning subscriber revenue it was generating, not just in the U.S., but all over the world. And Disney executive Kevin Mayer had lobbied inside the Disney C-suite for his company to get in the game now.