Skip to main content

Disney CEO Very Upbeat on Movie Downloads

Reuters reports that Walt Disney CEO, Robert Iger, said the company sold 125,000 movie downloads worth $1 million in revenue through Apple's iTunes online music store in the first week Disney movies were offered.

Iger told a conference of analysts the company expects to take in $50 million in added revenue during the first year of the iTunes movie download program, which was unveiled by Apple recently. Disney last week became the first movie studio to offer movie downloads through iTunes. The company placed 75 titles on the Web site.

Iger said the number of films on iTunes would increase as Disney clears the broadcast rights to move them to the Web. Iger also told analysts at the Goldman Sachs conference that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become a "sounding board" for Disney's rapidly expanding digital content delivery options.

"He is a great adviser and someone I can turn to readily for advice in a lot of these areas," Iger said. Those of you who have read my commentary entitled "How Steve Jobs Would Re-Imagine IPTV" know where I stand on this topic, so I won't belabor the point.

Popular posts from this blog

How Online Video Exceeded Pay-TV Revenue

The global streaming industry has spent the better part of a decade chasing subscriber counts as the primary metric of success. That era is now formally over. New market data from Omdia confirms that the industry has crossed a decisive threshold; one that shifts the competitive playing field from growth-at-all-costs to monetization discipline. For senior executives navigating media, advertising, and technology strategy, the implications extend well beyond entertainment. A Historic Revenue Crossover Online video revenue increased 13.5 percent to $176 billion in 2025, while pay-TV revenue declined 4 percent to $170 billion; marking the first time in the industry's history that streaming has surpassed legacy pay-TV in revenue terms. This is not a rounding error or a statistical artifact; it represents the culmination of more than a decade of structural disruption to the traditional broadcast and cable TV model. Global subscriptions to online video services reached 2.24 billion by the ...