Data Leak Shows Hulu Is The Streaming Cash Cow, NOT Disney+ | Financial News | Disney Stock News

roughly two months ago there was a data breach at the Walt Disney Company where nearly one terabyte of data was stolen and that has since been released on the internet and the Wall Street Journal among others have pilfered through some of that information and found what included spreadsheets of certain financial data things that they refer to as more granular detail on such Enterprises like Disney plus and what kind of Revenue that that streaming system by itself is actually bringing in that's something a bit unique because Disney doesn't typically give us that at least they haven't up to this point since Disney plus started in 2019 we've always had revenues and operating income for Disney plus piled in with other things like Hulu and ESPN plus now of course about a year ago Bob Iger decided to recast the financials of the Walt Disney Company which separated ESPN plus out from DTC or direct to Consumer so now when they report ENT entainment DTC it's Hulu and Disney plus but Hulu is still in the mix we've never gotten a clear detail of what's going on in Disney plus but this new leak does give us a little bit more information to see how maybe dire things are in that service [Music] ready onl the link Disney data uh this happened a couple of months ago now but apparently there's more details that have come out in the last couple of days and and one of the things apart from and you know I don't think I haven't seen the actual data I don't know how much it's out there um but obviously there was some financial data there's there was Private slack chat messages uh leaked all kind of stuff uh nothing according to these articles that were from SE Suite per se um but uh this is where we are passport numbers for a group of Disney Cruise Line workers Disney plus streaming Revenue sales of Genie plus theme park passes Trove of data from Disney that was leaked online by hackers earlier this summer includes a range of Financial and strategy information that sheds light on the entertainment Giants operations according to files viewed by The Wall Street Journal it also includes personally identifiable information of some staff and customers the leak file includes granular details about revenue generated by such products as Disney plus and ESPN plus Park pricing offers the company has modeled in what appear to be login credentials for some of Disney's Cloud infrastructure uh the journal did not attempt to access any of Disney's systems there like how they throw that in there hey we didn't try anything illegal with this we just we just looked at the illegally begotten information um we declined to comment on unified or unverified excuse me information The Wall Street Journal has purportedly obtained as a result of a bad actor's illegal activity so they did reach out to the Walt Disney Company uh at the Wall Street Journal and uh Disney said um we know nothing um was basically their answer here which I just I can't blame them uh they obviously they don't want to confirm or deny the veracity of the information that has allegedly been leaked cuz why would you um why give it any credibility even if it is real um but at the same time people are proceeding forward as though this is real information it very well could be it probably is we know how data leaks are unfortunately in this day and age uh but Disney told investors in an August regulatory filing that it is investigating the unauthorized release of over a terabyte of data from one of its communication systems uh data that a hacking entity calling itself null bulge uh released online spans more than 44 million messages from Disney's Slack workplace Communications tool upward of 18,800 spreadsheets and at least 13,000 PDFs uh the Wall Street Journal found so the Wall Street Journal like I said they got their hands on the whole thing I don't even know if this is out there anymore I think most of the websites that were hosting this illegally begotten information have been uh taken down or the pages that contain the data has been taken down again this was some months ago this happened and it's just it's I guess it's taken this long for a lot of these major Outlets to really piler through some of this stuff the scope of the material taken appears to be limited to public and private channels within Disney's slack that one employee had access to have a feeling that Disney figured out who that employee was might not be there anymore they might be on a James o'keef video soon we'll see um but that being said um this is this was some of the more interesting ones so Genie plus you know one of these things this was done at the you know right when Bob Chek was was kind kind of in the middle of being a co-ceo or CEO still um Josh deoro had taken over the parks they did the genie plus bit I think they claim here the file indicates that again allegedly to show you how much people said Genie plus sucked well I I told y'all when Chek was doing this stuff it didn't matter all it mattered is what kind of money would it turn would people buy it well apparently over the course of say two and a halfish years here uh the the leaked data indicates that Genie plus generated more than $724 million in pre-tax Revenue at Disney World by itself that's a lot of money that's a whole lot of money that's an amazing by way money yeah the fact that they are changing that given how much money it's making and given that the changes don't appear to be generating more gives you some indication of just how unpopular it was that they would modify it despite those revenues this yeah was really unpopular and it it was a sacrificing of the longterm of the parks for the short-term immediate monetary gain extraditing every possible dollar from people's wallets once they passed through the turn Styles yeah and Genie plus um was basically it was a you know an app you'd put on your phone and when you'd go into the park and I think you paid what was it 30 bucks per ticket extra or something along those lines um it was an optional feature you didn't have to have Genie plus you could pay extra for it um but but it it it I think it did well and I I would I would assume and this is the problem with this report that they don't put in here they give us raw figures and they say it's you know from October 21st through June of 24 well how did you get that if that was on a spreadsheet I would have love to have seen the quarterly progression of it meaning how much of that happened between October of 21 and say October of 22 I'd bet half of that or more because we all knew what happened with Disney Parks after they were able to reopen and all those International customers were coming in everybody was buying everything everybody was so pent up they were dropping money right and left and they would buy the perks hey Genie plus the new thing this will help us get on rides faster my point Pro to answer your question is why are they changing it now is because I don't think that this revenue is at all linear or on a growth trajectory I think it went way down I think Genie plus was a big hit when it started and then after about 12 months and the Polish came off the turd and everybody realized how bad this was and people were starting to make second trips into the park especially the locals in Orlando they all realized that Genie plus is trash it isn't worth it you go back and look at the look at the progression of YouTube videos from the time it started to a year later and probably tells the story so probably what happened is in that first fiscal year let's say they did half a billion dollars worth of Genie plus I have no idea but let's say it was that much and then the second year it was down to uh you know 100 the next year it was down to 50 and I think that's what happened here um I think most of that was done right at launch or within the first 12 months to 18 months of launch and then the other 18 months included in this or thereabout it fell apart Mak sense to me yeah I I totally agree yep but one of the things that came out of this that was that was certainly interesting was in the quarter ended March of the uh March 31st of this year the um the second fiscal quarter for the Walt Disney Company it said internal spreadsheet suggest suggest that Disney Plus generated about 2.4 billion in Revenue in the March quarter that amounts to about 43% of Revenue the company reports for its DTC entertainment business which as we remind folks doesn't include ESPN plus anymore that's strictly Hulu and Disney plus so we've always talked about from a standpoint of what really do the numbers look like and the numbers seemingly are kind of coming in more or less in line with what you can presume from the um from the actual reports let me show you what I mean let me pull this down I'm going to pull up one other screen here to go back to these reports I think I haven't laid into this uh excuse me this one if we look at the March quarter here we go if we look at the March quarter all right and we go down here to well first let's start with this they show us here okay March 30th 20 24 so this is the quarter they're saying that according to what they saw in a spreadsheet Disney plus itself minus Hulu did about 2.4 billion now on this screen all we have is the aggregate all we have is Disney plus and Hulu which you'll see right here I'll let me try to highlight this for youall right there Boom direct to Consumer this line here okay and that is under entertainment which does not include ESPN plus like I said 5.6 billion okay right there 5.6 billion now if you come up with 43% that's that's where they're coming up with they said 2.4 billion on there now the other way that we can determine this to see if the spreadsheet again we don't know if that was exactly for the whole quarter we don't know what these spreadsheets were there may have been data missing so who knows again we I have not seen these spreadsheets so it's all speculative but it's interesting to discuss to see how how runchy Disney plus has been um but if we look here there's an easy way to figure this out we take Disney plus core here $728 that was the average measure for the quarter $728 uh average revenue per user for Disney plus core and during the quarter they finished the quarter not an average of how much they had during the quarter they finished the quarter with about 117.5 million now if you take 1176 million and you multiply it by $728 you get there about 8 850 million I was told there wasn't going to be math he yeah I'm sorry multiply that by three you get about 2.5 uh billion $2.55 billion do in the quarter which is about 150 million more than what's suggested in these data leaks so again that that's giving you an idea of of where those are falling in line because I had questions about that during the week and I just wasn't able to address it I've had this crud since Tuesday um and then we had four days of tropical storm weather this week which guess what we're probably about to get three or four more this week so um it it when it rains it pours quite literally but if you look here just to kind of give you the power of of what Disney plus is and the fact that it's it's obviously it's not generating much because when you go back here and we look at what they made that quarter if we go back down here right and we look at the actual revenues again look at the operating incomes uh for oops for entertainment scroll back down I must have missed it I did I overshoot it where did it go well I had it to so here we go I went the wrong way my apologies um direct to Consumer for entertainment this is the quarter that they showed they made $47 million yay you know uh 2.4 billion from Disney Plus or 2.5 billion from Disney plus that quarter and 47 million here so we don't know how accurate the the 2.4 billion they gave in this leak is um I know what it says on the earnings report I'll Trust this for the time being because this is what Disney actually reported um that makes sense and we don't know exactly again how up todate or how complete that this leaked data was because I haven't seen it directly I've seen articles talk about it but I haven't seen it but the numbers seem to be more or less in line now of course I'm not including star India okay so that's a whole other thing they make an average of 70 cents per user uh on Disney hot star you see it right here 70s on uh 36 million subscribers so not even a dollar per sub so we're talking about nothing you know you're talking about uh uh not even a hundred million right there for the whole quarter for Disney hot star so um any case but you look at Hulu you can do the same thing sbod live TV Hulu with live TV here you can see the average revenue per user and and what Pro was talking about earlier the Hulu with live TV that's basically a complete that's that's a full-blown cable subscription is what that is that's you get all your cable through Hulu right I started I have Hulu now I've been trying that with live TV just to see how it works and playing with YouTube TV see what I like because probably spectrum is going to wind up going it I mean when you when you're going to charge me 25 or 30 bucks a month or whatever the hell they charge me just to get my local channels and they can kiss my butt it's G let me ask you a question um so we did in-depth analysis of that of this and I've got the uh that Park Place article in the private area if you want to take a look you don't have to um it's not necessary but up to you the lowest Disney Plus subscription plan for North America is $7.99 this data that was leaked out indicates that Disney is generating off of Disney plus alone only $521 during that quarter per month per user which is significantly lower than I think we were led to believe now I don't know if they said it explicitly or it was inferred but that seems dramatically lower and it also indicates to me that if that is the amount they are making per user Which is less than the lowest subscriber amount per month that's not profit by the way that's that's Revenue if that if that revenue is that low for Disney plus I don't see how they can increase content suffice to keep the subscribers where they are in other words it doesn't seem to me that that there's an I don't see how they can churn I don't see how they can expend what it's going to take to keep consumer staying with them if this is how little they're generating off of it it's bizarre make sure you're subscribed to Valiant Renegade and join us every Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern for the live show