DIS Investors Day: Iger: Global Disney.com; No Price Hikes For TV Downloads

Disney CEO Bob Iger and CFO Tom Staggs are taking questions from analysts at the end of the investors meeting. Some highlights:
Jobs & DRM: Iger: “I think he made a lot of valid points. I hadn’t given it that much thought until I read it yesterday.” That would be Steve Jobs, Disney shareholder and board member. I didn’t hear him proclaim an end to DRM, though.
Download pricing: Asked about room for movement in download TV episode prices, Iger talked a little about how the price was set in discussion with Jobs and ABC’s Anne Sweeney. “It was difficult to really tell what the right price was. Steve had a firm point of view … we ultimately decided $1.99 made sense as a start.” As for trying different prices, “I think consistency is really important. … It’s not just about how easy it is to download but how easy it is to find it and how easy it is to buy it.” Apple made it easy. As for changing pricing now, “It’s way too soon to tell whether there is more room in the pricing.” He repeated a number Sweeney used before: More than 50 million TV episodes have been downloaded on iTunes; more than one-third are from Disney.
Marketing Disney.com: The initial marketing is viral. Once Disney XD is out of beta, Iger expects marketing, including special events like a concert, to begin in earnest.
Global plans: Disney.com will go global including China eventually but probably U.K. first.
WDIG P&L: Staggs said late in the q&a that WDIG was “modestly” profitable last year but will lose a little this year because of expanded investments. It was described as an “attractive double digits-margin potential business.”
New media marketing: Staggs said the company has probably doubled its spend on new media platforms every year for the past few years: “We are spending more money on new media and believe it is vital for us to do that.”
iTunes: When someone asked about the discrepancy between the millions of TV shows sold on iTunes versus the 1.5 million movies, Iger reminded him that movies have only only been out a few months, only 100 movies were available, and the prices were higher.
M&A: Iger: “In terms of other potential acquisitions … we certainly have the balance sheet to acquire but … we certainly have no feeling as a company that we need to get bigger; we have all the scale that we need, quite frankly. … We’ll continue to look opportunistically, particularly as it relates to new media versus what I’ll call traditional media, to see whether there’s something that is a really good strategic fit, particularly if there is some underlying technology that will allow us to grow some of our businesses in new technology.”

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