Disney’s buying Fox has a Connected Society appeal
With consumers increasing shifting their content consumption to streaming services, be it online or via mobile, we are seeing a number of moves by companies to position themselves accordingly. AT&T (T) is looking to buy Time Warner (TWX), Alphabet (GOOGL) is expanding the reach of YouTubeTV and Apple (AAPL) is hiring programming talent. Amid all of this, Disney scooped up key content assets of Twenty-first Century Fox (FOXA) this week, a long-time strategy of the House of Mouse, but it also acquired the controlling interest in stream service Hulu.
That extra nugget could radically change and potentially accelerate Disney’s already announced plan to launch its own set of streaming services, one for Disney content and the other for ESPN. We see this as a potential gamechanger that also adds our Connected Society tailwind to the Content is King company that is Disney.
The deal puts Fox’s movie studio, 20th Century Fox, under the Disney umbrella, bringing with it the studio’s intellectual property. Having 20th Century Fox’s “X-Men” and “Avatar” under the same roof as Disney’s “The Avengers” and “Star Wars” could have huge ramifications in both the streaming world and the film industry.
Disney announced in August that it will pull its content from Netflix, effectively ending its relationship with the streaming service to start its own in 2019. This means Netflix users will no longer be able to watch content from Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar and Disney Animation.The deal between the two media giants means that Disney’s streaming service will include its own deep vault of intellectual property, as well as Fox’s decades of popular franchises, which would most likely get pulled from streaming competitors.
As much as this deal is about the content that Disney would be getting from Fox, it’s also about content competitors like Netflix would not.The deal also means Fox’s stakes in Hulu now belong to Disney, which already has an equal stake along with Comcast. With a majority stake in Hulu, Disney could change the award-winning streaming service’s offerings.
Source: What the Disney-Fox deal means for Marvel, ‘Avatar,’ and streaming – Dec. 14, 2017
