Tuesday may have been one of the biggest days in the history of ESPN (and parent company Disney) with their equity deal with the NFL, a new deal with the WWE for premium live event rights, and the announcement of their DTC platform launch.
It’s a transformative day for the future of ESPN and Disney as the companies move forward trying to navigate the streaming era. As to how well ESPN and Disney will be able to achieve those goals, that may become a bit harder to fully understand.
On their Tuesday earnings call where Bob Iger revealed that ESPN would explore future partners to bundle their app with other streamers (potentially resucesitating the idea behind the halted Venu Sports venture), more news was made with the revelation that the standalone Hulu app will fold into Disney+. With all ESPN content soon being folded into the ESPN app, the future of ESPN+ may be in doubt as well.
With this consolidation happening across the board, Disney will no longer release subscriber numbers for ESPN+, Disney+, and Hulu according to their earnings call.
“We are focused on managing our businesses to deliver growth in a sustained way, and to align our financial reporting with how we operate. Since we began reporting the number of paid subscribers and ARPU, our DTC strategy and the operating environment have evolved. Given this evolution, we plan to implement changes to our Entertainment and Sports financial disclosures. Among our planned changes, we believe quarterly updates on the number of paid subscribers and ARPU have become less meaningful to evaluating the performance of our businesses, and we will no longer report these metrics starting with the first quarter of fiscal 2026 for Disney+ and Hulu and the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025 for ESPN+. While we will no longer disclose subscribers and ARPU, we will provide information on Entertainment Direct-to-Consumer profitability.”
These steps by Disney follow in the footsteps of Netflix, who halted the reporting of subscriber numbers in 2024. Like Netflix, Disney would rather investors focus on bottom line revenue and other factors instead of one baseline number. The company has also taken the lead from Netflix in trying to crackdown on password sharing.
The original Disney bundle that the company sold to families, fans, and consumers at home was the ESPN+, Disney+, and Hulu collection. But in the rapidly changing media industry, that bundle will soon be obsolete. Disney+ and Hulu will be combined. And eventually all signs point to the ESPN app gobbling up what was on ESPN+. In fact, ESPN+ may only stick around to see out its contractual obligations before falling by the wayside.
What the industry will really want to know is how many subscribers the ESPN DTC platform has at launch, and how it is able to grow and find success. But it’s a complicated web as to who signs up for it, who will have access via a cable subscription, and who might need both to access all content. If it’s not a pure subscriber count, investors will certainly want to know the raw numbers on whether or not all of these huge streaming moves ultimately pay off.
About Matt Yoder