Robert Iger
Analyst · Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.
The goal obviously is to operate Hulu profitably and we're not going to say how long that might take. That could shift a bit because, at some point, we'll look more aggressively at some international rollouts of Hulu as well. And I think it's also premature to discuss much about Hulu because, until the Fox deal closes, we only own 30% of it. We'll own 60% when the deal closes, and we'll be prepared to talk more, perhaps, about Hulu's strategy at that point. But what we said when we decided to launch ESPN+ and Disney+ is that rather than creating one gigantic fat bundle of sports, general entertainment programming and family programming, we thought we'd serve the consumer better by segregating all three. Ultimately, our goal would be to use the same tech platform to make it easier for people to sign up for all three should they want to, same credit card, same username, same password, et cetera, but give the consumer the kind of choice that we think consumers are going to demand more and more in today's world. If they wanted to buy all three, we'd give them that opportunity, potentially at a discount, or two for that matter. But if they wanted to buy one of them, we believe they should be able to. So someone who wants sports should be able to buy just sports and so on. In terms of going back to the first part of the question in terms of profitability - well, actually in terms of our belief in the platform, there's enough out there in your sector and ours, meaning in media and in the businesses that follow media that have been talking about direct to consumer growth. And we see that obviously with some of the big players in the space, notably Netflix. We think there's huge potential for Hulu to grow as well as for the other services to grow and plenty of room for other entrants in the marketplace. But we aim to take advantage of, on the Disney and the ESPN side, our brands and that expertise. And on the Hulu side, we hope to take advantage of the fact that they've already launched successfully and their brand is starting to build some equity, but also in the production capabilities of the businesses that we have, including the businesses that we're buying.