Disney – The Dollar Store Tech Giant
Disney has announced something that Bob Iger lives for, a big merger. Hulu+ Live TV will be merging with FUBOTV. For those of you who are unaware of what FUBO is, it’s a streaming service that covers cable and local channels. It’s the streaming version of Comcast and so for that matter is “Hulu+ LiveTV.” Basically, Disney wants to Swallow HL+TV’s biggest competitor. Now I think there is a very good chance it’s going to get shot down by the Fed but in case it doesn’t it will give Disney market dominance in the cable-streaming marketplace, at least until the network TV model completely collapses when the Boomers start seriously kicking the bucket in about 15 years.
I think the only reason Iger is pushing this thing so hard is to bolster his claims of being a tech company CEO instead of what he is, an overpromoted network TV executive that has been turning a movie company into a TV company for twenty years now.
Iger’s obsession with his dead buddy Steve Jobs is approaching necrophilia. He keeps declaring with total conviction that Disney is a tech company in the face of all available evidence. Okay, yes, Disney does have a streaming service just like Apple. Granted, you can do more with Apple TV but that’s only because Apple has the unfair advantage of being an actual tech company.
The Disney CEO’s Jobsmania might look odd to an outsider but when you get to know Iger just a little bit, it becomes less strange. Both men were born in the 1950s so both were Baby Boomers. They came of age when their generation went far left and they went with it. Both men wanted to change the world when they started out. Except only one of them succeeded.
Unless you are a Boomer Leftie yourself you have no idea the kind of agape the Boomer Left holds Steve Jobs in. He was the right kind of self-made billionaire. He didn’t do nasty things like build steel plants, railroads, and cars. He made easy-to-use computers that were cool and futuristic and stuff.
Iger on the other hand had been an ABC sports producer back when Wide World of Sports was the top sports show on TV. They were cool kids at the network, they drove sports cars in Italy and wore Gucci loafers without socks. Fun stuff to be sure but hardly world-changing. If he kept going the way he’d been going he would have ended up in charge of ABC Sports or at least be having lunch with the guy who was doing that on a regular basis.
The glass ceiling above Bob Iger shattered like the hopes of Disney fans during D23 meeting when the network was bought out by Capital Cities. He rocketed up the corporate ladder after that and was on the verge of becoming its CEO when Michael Eisner merged ABC with Disney.
Five years later Michael Eisner was forced to pick to a COO for Disney by the board. Since ABC was the only division that was on top at the time, Iger became the number 2 man at Disney.
When Iger became CEO of Disney he was sitting on top of the greasiest flagpoles. There was serious opposition to him on the board, enough so that his job was being precariously held. The Pixar buyout was not inevitable but someone buying Pixar was. By the early 2000s, the only major independent studios left in Hollywood were Disney and Pixar. Everybody else had long been acquired by someone else and Pixar simply couldn’t survive as an independent.
Jobs needed to sell Pixar but Iger was a lot more frantic to buy. But there was more to it than that. Iger wanted to be best friends with his generation’s business hero, Steve Jobs. And given in his biography he made it clear that he was hoping to sell Disney to Apple, I suspect he had begun thinking of himself as Steve Jobs’corporate heir. Once that fell permanently through he began thinking of himself as his spiritual heir.
The problem with that is, that Disney is not a tech company. Never really was. The closest it ever came to that was WED/Imagineering. While there is no doubt that in it’s day, Imagineering accomplished some truly amazing things, these things were not for sale to the general public.
Something that has been noticed more and more in recent years is the Imagineering publicity stunts. Electronic one-off vanity projects. They will come up with something flashy and order all of their media allies (shills) to come cover it and then it will vanish, pretty much the next day, and never be seen again.
There was a real-life Wall-E that made a few public appearances at places like D23, had to be heavily chaperoned, then vanished without trace
There was a Judy Hops robot that crawled out of a box did a few somersaults and roller skated around. This was technically much more impressive but since there is no way in hell you could let this multimillion-dollar robot interact with nine-year-old children who will beat it with a lightsaber I don’t see how it’s going to be anything but a publicity stunt.
A bunch of adorable little BDX Droids appeared in Galaxy Edge in Galaxy’s Edge for about a week. Again, they had to be heavily escorted before vanishing without trace.
There was something that did make it into one of the parks. A Spiderman robot gets catapulted from one building to another during an otherwise dull stunt show at the California Disneyland. Now unlike the other robots I mentioned this one is being utilized regularly by Disney. Granted it isn’t being allowed to interact with guests but at least it isn’t a wasted investment. Unless you count the fact that this show will never recoup its costs because of this robot Spider-Man.
Apparently, Iger hates water
Then there has been this clearly deliberate effort to turn areas of the parks into technology company campuses. All of the theming in Epcot’s Fountain View court has been completely torn out in the last five years to leave the kind of sterile, boiling-hot courtyard with some minimalist art that Steve Jobs so loved.
The Disney Stores have also had all their theming stripped mined out. Having been in those places when they were heavily themed, I can assure you the idea of buying something you normally wouldn’t becomes nearly irresistible because you are having an experience you could not have had anywhere else. That absurdly expensive Mickey Mouse Christmas ornament is as much a souvenir of the store itself as it is a product.
All of that is gone now. Why? Because Steve Jobs made the Apple Stores as minimalist as possible to showcase the product. Okay, that worked fine for the minimalist but aesthetically pleasing Macbooks, iPods, and Apple Whatevers. You know what that doesn’t work for? A $30 Christmas tree bulb you can for twenty dollars cheaper on eBay.
All of these things have been done to bolster Disney’s image, (awarded to it by Bob Iger), as a tech company. And I can’t help but get the feeling that the only reason Iger has done it is to salve the wound to his pride of never becoming the CEO of Apple.
