I recently found this newly written article that has a lot to do with this topic, so I decided to write and quote on it here. In CB Insights, “The Race For Digital Media: New York Times, Verizon, News Corp In A Rush To Grab Media Startups,” we see Disney (among other corporates and media giants) advance in their technology and media utilization.
“Media giants have been investing in startups at an increasingly rapid pace. Large media companies, such as The New York Times Company, Hearst Corporation, and Comcast, have made over 100 deals to startups this year. And funding and deal count from private market transactions involving these corporates have been growing every year since 2012, with 2016 projected to total over $4B.”
Disney is among 22 of the identified media companies that have been the most active investors in private markets in recent years, and CB Insights did research and used tools to analyze their activity. On their list of corporates, with big names like The Washington Post (#1) and CBS (#22), Disney is #7 (listed as the “The Walt Disney Company/Disney Accelerator”). According to CB Insights, some key things to take away from the timeline are, in relation to Disney, that Disney was one of three companies to take a major corporate stake in Hulu (the popular subscription on-demand service) in 2013. Besides Disney, Fox Broadcasting and NBC Universal were two other companies that did so in that year. Also in 2013, Univision Communications and Disney launched Fusion. Fusion is a television cable and satellite Hispanic news and satire channel. However, Disney has since exited Fusion.
To sum all the data up, CB Insights makes a list of “Major Acquirers In Media Since 2013.” On that list, you can see the companies and all the major acquisitions (the company :gdgt in 2/13/2013 by the acquirer company: AOL, and most recently, the company: Vessel in 10/26/2016 by the acquirer company: Verizon Communications, etc. Here is the Walt Disney Studio part of the list that I filtered out.
| Fusion Media Network | 2/11/2013 | The Walt Disney Company, Univision Communications |
| Hulu | 7/12/2013 | Fox Broadcasting, NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Company |
| Maker Studios | 5/12/2014 | The Walt Disney Company |
Very interesting. Everything listed and all the dates are in accordance to the other research we’ve seen, with Disney’s Financials and charts (from Reuters, etc.). One important thing I want to note is the acquisition in 2014 of Maker Studios. We also saw this information in the Marketline data, and 2014 is when Disney started rising and gained near its peak (all this we saw starting from 2012). “Maker Studios is a media company that aims to bridge the gap between YouTube and television”… and provides “sustainable programming and building large audiences on YouTube, offerings to partners include development, production, promotion, distribution, sales, marketing and enterprise.” Maker Studios definitely played a part in the rise of Disney to power, and we start to see from these charts, lists, and articles how much so, but also where the company focused its strategies.
If you want to read more about this article click here: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/top-digital-media-companies-mergers-acquisitions-timeline/
Disney and the Internet 