Disney’s Instagram page interacting with fans, and getting ready for the Christmas/holiday season. This pine decoration is actually very popular and symbolic (it has been displayed in their old holiday and Christmas Carol VCR tapes). In this new and modern way via social medias, Disney brings back/continues old traditions for upcoming holidays.
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:Â https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/top-digital-media-companies-mergers-acquisitions-timeline/
Here is Disney’s official Twitter page making a post about their new movie: Moana (which I really want to see too). They include an entertaining clip to advertise Moana; however, there is something different about the tweet this time. The source is actually from Disney’s own Instagram page! All Disney’s social media are tied together to further benefit the company as a whole (and as we have seen). Using Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc., the social media team at Disney is hard at work and continuing to help through the Internet!
Disneyâs Wifi Internet was innovative and game-changing, with its roll-out back in 2012. I wanted to highlight a timestamp/time frame where Disney utilized the technology and demonstrated something big. Today, we’re going to focus on a certain article, “Walt Disney World rolls out free Wi-Fi Internet at Magic Kingdom theme park, enabling further NextGen Fastpass testing” (Brigante, 2012). Even though this reading was written a few years ago, I feel as if it is still relevant today, and sheds a light on how much influence Disney brought to theme parks in respect to Wi-fi and the Internet.Â
“Guests visiting the Magic Kingdom can currently connect to a Wi-Fi network called âDisney-Guestâ and, after agreeing to Disneyâs terms of usage, are able to tweet, post to Facebook, browse the web, and freely use the Internet.” I have used this Wi-fi network before, first when I went to Disney World in 2013, and again when I went in 2015 (last year). Disney kept up with the times, providing every park goer Internet access, knowing full well that people nowadays “can’t survive” without their phones and the web. At the time the article was written, Disney planned “to provide free Wi-Fi in all four theme parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disneyâs Hollywood Studios, and Disneyâs Animal Kingdom) as well as Downtown Disney by early 2013.” They certainly did so. Nowadays, everything at Disney is Internet and Wi-fi based. With apps like “My Disney Experience” (which I used), and the new NextGen FastPass which uses Wi-Fi (which I also used), everything is usually much more convenient and expedited.
When they made free Wi-fi for the theme-park goers a thing, it was massive and brought awe. However, there were also negative points in this change as well; for example, there was a picture of the theme parkâs Mbps at the time, which was very very slow. Donât always expect blazing speeds while surfing the ânet in the parks. “While at the Magic KIngdom, local guest Johnny Norris (@NorrisJohnyWG) sent over one surprising result of a Wi-Fi speed test.” In the picture, it shows a “download speed” of 0.2 Mbps, and an “upload speed” of 1 Mbps. This is pretty slow to say the least, but I believe that it is much faster nowadays, after these couple years. Another problem was, “the unreliable availability of Internet access over cellular connections, necessary for receiving park information.” For example, the “My Disney Experience” app provides ride/show wait times, Â people’s Fastpasses, and other info. Having no connection during those times and bringing down the app was indeed a predicament. Disney fixed this problem by making free Wi-Fi available to park guests, also allowing future integration with Internet-enabled mobile apps. It is interesting to see how it all started, and how the Wifi/technology has changed throughout the years for Disney and its parks
If you want to read more about it here is the link for the article down below:
Disney is using many of its resources here from what we’ve talked about and explored so far. A few years ago, Disney acquired LucasFilm and effectively the Star Wars franchise. These are future plans for Disney World, the theme park(s) that is so adept at using technology and the Internet to profit. In this post, they combine all these factors together, and again use the Internet and social media to promote their products, which will no doubt be successful!
Tweet from the Official Disney Twitter account, promoting the releases of their upcoming movies (like live action “Mulan”) and interacting with their audience.
The history of The Walt Disney Company (Walt Disney or “the company”) can be traced back to 1923, when Walt Disney and Roy Disney set up Disney Brothers Studio in Hollywood, California. Plane Crazy (or as most people know as “Steamboat Willie”), directed by Walt Disney, was the first cartoon produced by Disney studios in 1928. That was the beginning of the company, but forward a couple decades, and in 1998, Disney purchased web services from Starwave, a Seattle based software company. Disney also acquired 43% stake in internet search engine Infoseek for $70 million and launched the GO network, in 1999. Subsequently, the company bought the remaining 57% interest in Infoseek and formed GO.com, a web portal, which eventually became Walt Disney Internet Group. Go.com was not a great business deal for the company, which we will delve on more later, when we explore more about this decision in future articles.
In the early 2001, Walt Disney expanded its theme parks in Anaheim, the US and restructured its Internet business. For example, the company re-entered into a multi-year agreement with Eastman Kodak, a technology company focused on imaging for business, to make Kodak the exclusive imaging supplier of film and related products at Disney theme parks/resorts. Skip a few years, and in 2005, Walt Disney’s internet group acquired Minds Eye, one of the leading interactive television games developers.Â
2012 was the “start of something new” and great for Disney. That year, Walt Disney and Comcast announced a long-term distribution agreement that would deliver the company’s sports, news and entertainment content to Comcast’s Xfinity TV customers. This would help deliver video content to customers across multiple platforms using the latest technology and cloud innovation. Also in 2012, Disney, the Ministry of Culture’s China Animation Group, and Tencent, China’s largest internet service provider, formed a partnership to create “The National Animation Creative Research and Development Cooperation,” to advance the country’s animation industry. Finally, the company acquired Lucasfilm (as we all know and love), a fully-integrated entertainment company, the studio that produced the renowned Star Wars films.
2012 is a really important year for Disney, as we see a huge increase in financial information and charts starting from that year. This is in part due to the major technology and animation investments and acquisitions the company made. From 2012 to the high point of 2015/2016, there was a four-times increase of Disney’s financials and stocks (high of $122.08 at the end of 2015.
(Market data chart of 20 years for Disney, showing years from 1996-2016)
Many financial sites and charts showed the same huge increase for the company throughout these years. Technology and the Internet definitely played a major factor for Disney’s development and success. The company’s most recent technology endeavor was entering “into an agreement to acquire Maker Studios, a network of online video content on YouTube, for approximately $500 million, and a performance-linked earn-out of up to $450 million, in 2014.” The acquisition was really important and beneficial because it provided advanced technology and business intelligence capability regarding consumers’ discovery and interaction with short-form online videos, especially Disney’s content (ex. “As Told By Emoji”).
The information and data from the this post and the last post are from:
and Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/chart?symbol=DIS.N)
Some Disney financial facts and data:
Disney has around 185,000 employees, and an annual revenue of US$M 52,465.0
“The company recorded revenues of $52,465 million during the financial year ended October 2015 (FY2015), an increase of 7.5% over FY2014. In FY2015, the US and Canada, the company’s largest geographic market, accounted for 76.9% of the total revenues.”
Walt Disney generates revenues through five business segments: media networks (44.3% of the total revenues in FY2015), Parks and Resorts (30.8%), studio entertainment (14%), consumer products (8.6%) and interactive (2.2%). (We will be focusing on the media networks, studio entertainment, and interactive segments). In FY2015, the media networks segment recorded revenues of $23,264 million, an increase of 10% over FY2014. The studio entertainment segment recorded revenues of $7,366 million in FY2015, an increase of 1.2% over FY2014. The interactive segment recorded revenues of $1,174 million in FY2015, a decrease of 9.6% as compared to FY2014.
For the most part, the company is doing very well, recording a majority of FY (Fiscal Years) increases from the previous year. How did the company fare in years past, with the rise of the Internet and technology?
(Steady increase in “Revenue” for the Walt Disney Company from 2014-2016)
I came across a timeline of Disney’s successes through innovation and technology recently, and would like to share it. In “14 iconic milestones of Disney innovation,” we take a look at Disney’s “groundbreaking technology” and how the company has changed and developed throughout the years. In 1929, the famous “Steamboat Willie” was released, with synchronized sound cartoons. After the success of the first animated movie, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1937), a couple years passed, and the company produced the movie “Fantasia” (1982 version), the first “film done in digital sound.” “Toy Story’ is one of the best Pixar films, with “Toy Story 3′ being one of my top Pixar movies to watch. Pixar released the first computer animated full-length film (Toy Story) in 1995.
ABC is another news station owned by the overall Disney brand. “ABC became the first network to offer ad-supported TV episodes online for free, via its own branded player,” in 2006. I will be talking about the Disney Theme Parks a lot in the upcoming posts, with the technology like MagicBands coming to the front of the headlines. In 2013, MagicBands were released at Disney World (and other theme parks), which allowed customers and visitors to come in/pay with RFID tags. Finally, last year (2015), Disney released an Apple Watch, with Mickey Mouse on its face! Through the century, all different technologies have influenced Disney and let it become the power it is today. Using these new and upcoming innovations, like Virtual Reality for example, Disney will continue to thrive and expand in the coming years.
Here is the link to the source if you want to check it out:Â http://fortune.com/2014/12/29/disney-innovation-timeline/
Disney’s Official Instagram page, interacting with their fans at their theme parks like Disneyland (and Disney World). This one is taken all the way at Shanghai, showing the spread of the company throughout the world through the Internet.
Disney and the Internet 