Walt Disney Co is seeing paid subscribers of its sports video streaming service ESPN+ likely to be reaching between 8 million and 12 million by the end of the fiscal 2024 year, shared the company on Thursday.
Disney disclosed its forecast, of paid subscription to be significantly increased in next few years, in a streaming video strategy presentation to Wall Street.
Christine McCarthy, Disney’s chief financial officer, said during that webcast presentation on investor day that annual operating losses that ESPN+ will be making in both fiscal 2019 and 2020 are expected to be $650 million, but, the one-year-old service will is likely to be start making profits by 2023.
Patrice Cucinello, a director at Fitch Ratings, took the Disney’s stance positively and acknowledged the company’s need to show the subscription growth to confirm the investment. He said that Disney has been publicizing their guidance related to the number of subscribers to the market and has been directly targeting the consumers.
In the midst of a rising cord cutting trend, resulting in cable and traditional media companies losing business to the digital streaming services like Netflix Inc, Disney is establishing new businesses of streaming video which will directly capture the consumers.
A year ago, Disney came on launching ESPN+ in a bid to try out monthly or annual subscription offering of its streaming services and distribution of additional sports contents directly to consumers. And since its inception, ESPN+ succeeded to draw million of subscribers, made sports right agreements and experience rising popularity of its mo bile app.
Besides the sports content, Disney is also focusing on a larger plan of moving ahead with Disney+ with slate of its new and classic blockbuster movies.
Currently, ESPN+ is holding over 2 million paying sports fans, according to Disney, which are roughly the same as disclosed by the company in February.
