The comparison is obviously unfair. Netflix was launched in a world of slower internet connections and before app stores, smart TVs and tablets. But regardless, Disneys success is a lesson for any incumbent company on how to manage the looming and constant threat of technological change.
In 2019, Disney appeared laughably late to streaming. Netflix had moved from a DVD-by-post company to a streaming one 12 years earlier and Amazon was in a strong second-place. Disney had dipped its toes, holding a stake in US service Hulu and running a limited offering called DisneyLife in the UK. But given that streaming was so obviously the future, its failure to give the medium full support meant it seemed to be losing ground by the day.
In reality, it is often simply impossible for established companies to successfully ditch one market and enter a new one so late. As pointed out by the late Harvard academic Clayton Christensen, who popularised the idea of disruptive innovation, cultural and financial factors make it almost impossible for successful companies to kill the golden goose in order to better raise its children.
Disney had large profits from its cable and cinema divisions to protect, and shareholders to keep happy. Few public companies, even those led by characters as strong as Iger, have the freedom to repeatedly sacrifice profit for the possibility of future growth, as Jeff Bezos Amazon did for two decades. What Iger instead did was spend several years laying the groundwork for an eventual entry into streaming when the time was right. It bought minority stakes in Hulu and BAMTech, a technology supplier, that gave it options for when it did want to jump into streaming.
Meanwhile, it invested heavily in content - a reliably important element, whatever the technology - buying 21st Century Fox as well as the Star Wars and Marvel franchises. So by late 2019, by which time it was almost too late, Disney had all the elements it needed to be successful.
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Disney beating Netflix is a lesson for companies threatened by tech giants - Telegraph.co.uk
