YouSaid · the spoken record

John Skipper

lines on the record
17
first
2024-08-26
most recent
2024-08-26
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Disney Plus wanted to be well stocked on content for all corners of the streaming battlefield, and so the company ordered every entertainment division to get working, creating fresh new shows like diary and tons of shows based on existing Disney IP. And then there was all of Disney's back catalog, the movies and shows that families with kids would love to have at their fingertips. But the streaming wars were gearing up, battles forming on every front, tons of enemies, few allies, and Netflix leading the charge with a decade-long head start. Every strategic advantage needed to be seized and leveraged. Every opportunity needed to be considered.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “In other words, Wiley Coyote could see the cliff, and so if Disney had arrived at the edge of the chasm, it had no other choice but to dive in. By august twenty seventeen, Eiger was ready to go public with a plan.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “But Skipper, along with Kevin Mayer, who would go on to lead Disney streaming reconfiguration, didn't think there was too high a price for this technology. Bamtech was the best in class, and Disney needed a quick way to speed to the top.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Meanwhile, Netflix wasn't the only tech company that had made the leap into entertainment. Amazon was starting to produce Zeitgeist shows like Transparent, and studios that made premium content were sprouting up in previously unlikely places. So now it was time for Disney to make a pivot, for the entertainment company to act like a tech company, for Disney to become a streamer itself. Step one, it made its first big investment in Bamtech in twenty sixteen, and eventually bought the whole company for more than three and a half billion dollars.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “By twenty fifteen Eiger had caught on. He was watching Game of Thrones on HBO's shiny new streaming platform, and ESPN's cable subscribers had started to make a big enough dip for him to feel like he had to tell investors about it.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So, yeah, when you were faced with, do we want to miss earnings? For a couple of years, or do we want to take Netflix's money, impress Wall Street with our earnings growth, and it worked? And it worked and worked and worked until it didn't work. Love the narrative that Disney messed up, didn't understand it was coming. We knew there was a precipice, but it was not right in front of us. We, you know, we're like Wiley Coyote falling off a cliff. But if Wally Coyote can't see the end of the cliff, all he sees is desert in front of them, in our case all we saw was lush jungle of money in front of us. And you don't see the cliff. You don't jump off before you have to drive me up to the cliff so I can jump off now.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “By supplying great content to Netflix, Disney was getting paid, but it was also building Netflix's business, helping it become a primary pick for home entertainment. Disney thought its identity as an entertainment company would keep it relevant over a tech company, but as more and more people turned to Netflix for entertainment, it all got a little confusing for Disney.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “So why not Dipitoin and let another company handle the hard stuff, a company that could eat the cost of maintaining the platform, someone to deal with the people, a partner who would pay Disney a lot of money for the privilege of streaming its movies for them. Disney turned to the incumbent.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “What Skipper is saying here is that Disney, NESPN, made the content. ESPN, for instance, racked up sports rights cultivated on air talent and expanded into narrative documentaries, but it never once had to send a bill to a customer. So maybe there was something more holding Disney back from making a switch to streaming, something more than pie charts and future modeling. Maybe it was Disney's own understanding of its place in the world order. Disney wasn't a tech company like Netflix, nor was it a distributor also like Netflix. Early on, Disney did partner with other big media companies to build Alu, but it mostly existed to make next day reruns of broadcast shows available online. You originally didn't even need a paid subscription to watch. But fully owning and operating a Disney branded streaming platform just did not feel like the company's lane, and it didn't feel like a good investment either.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And remember, it's a beautiful system. It's probably the best model in the history of media. The distributors deal with customer service. They deal with credit cards. They deal with how to get the signal to people. You don't have to do any of that. All we got to do is create content. We sell it to somebody else. They deal with all the technological issues. They deal with the customer service issues. We just get paid.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Would do these models where we would say if we were to completely pivot, what would we have to charge and how many subscribers would we have to have? And it was a very scary thing to look at. And when you looked at it, you were like, hmm, that is not going to happen. It is not going to be possible that, because at that point, we still had 85 to 90 million subscribers.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Danger from a completely new way of watching TV and movies that cape away cable subscribers undermining Disney's most lucrative division at the time. So why not meet the consumer where they were? Why not make a Disney streaming service to capture the Millennial Flight from cable? A win was a win, right? Not exactly. Richard Pepler from HBO again.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Because at that point, I now am sitting at the staff meeting with Bob Eiger and Alan Horn, the head of the studio, et cetera, et cetera. And they clearly had been thinking about it longer. They understood intellectually that there is some really significant thing coming, that there is danger.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “This is John Skipper. He spent the bulk of his career at the Walt Disney Company, first in the publishing division in the early nineties and eventually as president of ESPN. Over the course of his own career's ascent, he saw Disney's cable business grow to unprecedented heights of profitability. But in twenty twelve when Skipper became president and ESPN's performance was so wildly spectacular, something else happened.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Going to try to take it away, all of it. And then I can remember actually sitting in the conference room and watching the numbers go up increasing as the minutes went by. And we held. There were no tech glitches. There were no real problems. I wish you good fortune in the wars to come. And I can remember sitting there and seeing that it worked. It was almost like I imagined the feeling of the NASA people when the rocket lands on the moon. And you said, you know, thank God it worked.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “We had about five, six months, if I remember correctly, to get this thing ready. And to stress test it beforehand, which we did, to make sure we weren't going to not only embarrass ourselves, but create a huge problem with our consumers who were expecting to be able to see it in all different forms, including on HBO Now.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Kept coming back to us was that BAMTEC really were the best engineers, the best service, and that they could help us build our own back end, which would give us the capacity to distribute direct to consumer.”

    2024-08-26 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Disney Is a Tech Company? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT