Cord-Cutting

At Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Devin Leonard talks to Disney's Bob Iger about Disney+.  The article is not directly about TV journalism, but the implication is clear:  The future of video lies in streaming rather than cable, which means an ever-smaller audience for cable news.

It wasn’t easy for Disney to shift its focus to streaming, he says. For many years its cable networks, led by ESPN, generated 40% of profits. A big move to the internet was almost certain to cannibalize that business, to say nothing of Disney’s lucrative home-video operation. By the same token, standing pat as consumers fled to Netflix wasn’t an option, either.

Iger says the wake-up call came one day in August 2015, when he revealed that Disney was feeling the effects of cord cutting—people canceling their cable memberships and signing up for streaming services—and that ESPN had suffered modest cable subscription losses. Disney’s shares tumbled 9%. He’d known the stock would take a hit, but not that it would fall that far. “I try not to predict what Wall Street’s going to do, because I’m usually not right,” he says.