Investors Press Disney on “Quantity Over Quality” During Q4 and FY 2020 Earnings Call

With the Walt Disney Company having an increased focus on DTC (direct to consumer) business model, some investors are seemingly concerned that Disney might focus on churning out a lot of subpar content for Disney Plus vs. maintaining the high quality standards that Disney has been historically known for.

During the Q&A of the Disney Q4 and FY 2020 Earnings Call, Michael Nathanson from MoffatNathanson asked Bob Chapek during the call about maintaining the quality of upcoming films and television series, to which Disney CEO Bob Chapek replied that Disney needed to manage “the churn” of subscribers, which required a lot of new content.

Seemed a bit of a dodgy answer to a pretty direct question.

However, Disney itself might not even know yet how to balance putting out the amount of content it needs to keep people coming back to Disney Plus, and keeping the quality of its programming and movies to “Disney standards” going forward.

One ongoing joke about rival Netflix is that they’ll literally greenlight anything, as they have historically slammed consumers with tons and tons of content… of varying quality.

Getting those Netflix shows to get picked up after a first season seems to be a challenge though.

One “Achilles Heel” of Disney Plus has been its lack of original content. In fact, some media outlets are speculating that it’s definitely contributing to subscriber churn and usage decline.

While they can’t all be The Mandalorian, let’s just hope that the company still maintains the basic Disney quality control going forward.

[Source: Disney Q4 Call]