Launched just months before the pandemic struck, Disney+ notched defining hits in 2020 like "The Mandalorian,""Hamilton," and "Soul."
Content became king amid COVID-19 shutdowns, but driving Disney+'s product development, launch, and aggressive global expansion was Disney+ and ESPN+ president Michael Paull. Paull joined the streamer BAMTech as CEO in March 2017, about five months before Disney acquired majority ownership of the company. Over the next six months or so, his team led product development on and built the go-to-market plan for ESPN+, and collaborated with ESPN to launch the service in April 2018.
"We were able to leverage, in my opinion, the best content portfolio from a sports perspective in the industry," Paull said. "And then, of course, we came up with a pricing proposition that was very attractive."
In November 2019, his group repeated the feat with Disney+, which has 103.6 million subscribers (Netflix took nearly 10 years to reach that number).
Now Disney+, like many other streamers, is experiencing slowed subscriber growth as Hollywood hotly debates the company's simultaneous release of Marvel's "Black Widow" in theaters and via Disney+ Premier Access (for $30). Paull declined to comment on these new challenges, but the executive cheered the service's recent creative laurels: 71 Emmy nominations for the service, with "The Mandalorian" tying Netflix's "The Crown" for the most nods. ("WandaVision" scored 23 nominations and is a favorite with Paull's kids, ages 7 and 9, who also watch "Monsters at Work.")
"It was a validation of all the great work the studio creatives have been doing," Paull said. "It's just amazing, actually, to get to there."
In an interview with Insider, Paull credited Disney's content teams and deep well of intellectual property for this awards milestone as he broke down the thrills of building Disney+, the unique challenges of global expansion, and why he looks for "great athletes" to build out his teams.
Conversation condensed and edited for clarity.
Looking back, what were the largest hurdles your teams faced in developing and launching both ESPN+ and Disney+?
In the early days of streaming, companies would support only a small number of platforms because they figured out, you know, these are the easier platforms to support and most households have those platforms. We took a different approach: The goal that I gave the team is, I want every TV set in the household to be able to watch Disney+ and ESPN+. So not just the new TV in the living room but even the older television in the kids' room or in the kitchen, and that's a very lofty goal.
We also created a strategy to enable Disney+ to work on set-top boxes, and we've been deploying that strategy around the world because we recognize in many parts of the world, that's still the primary box that consumers are using to watch content.
What has been the biggest surprise to you about how Disney+ has been received?
It probably shouldn't have been a surprise, but the fandom that exists, the emotional connection between Disney fans and Disney+ was really remarkable. Just seeing the responses we're getting when we're dropping a new episode of "Loki": There are people who are waiting up until 3 in the morning to watch those episodes when we drop it on the East Coast — and not a small number of people — and it just shows massive fandom and massive emotional attachment to our content.
What has been the biggest challenge about global expansion?
When we first architected Disney+, we were thinking about it as a global service.
In the early days, certain companies, when they went global, they just turned their service on, right? And it worked. But they didn't have all the arrangements in place with the CDNs and others to make sure the streaming quality was absolutely excellent. They didn't localize the service — whether it was language or currency or local payment mechanisms — or even localizing marketing activities to make sure that they understood the consumer so they could position the product in an appropriate way.
Where we came in, we were able to do all of those things, but they're hard. Being able to support all of these different currencies and all of these different payment mechanisms and localizing not only the product but all the marketing collateral, subs and dubs, for all of the contents and all of these languages. There's an incredible amount of operational work that had to go into making all of that happen.
Do you have thoughts about which IP Disney+ could further explore and develop into film and TV?
We give the creative teams input about what's happening on the service and what's working and what's working better and all of that, but the actual decision-making on how they are going to develop IP, I would defer to our other groups.
We did a very robust presentation at our investor day on the incredible amount of content that's coming. What I'd like is for it to get completed and made available and ready for the service — in light of some of the shutdowns and or slowdowns that have happened due to the pandemic — but I'm extremely optimistic about what's coming to the surface in the future.
How do you hire and organize teams to tackle these challenges?
We're looking for, first and foremost, great athletes: people that are smart, that are hardworking, that are passionate about what we're doing and will fit within our culture. We've been very focused on creating a culture that really starts and ends the day focused on the consumer and is very focused on scalability. So we need to find people and talent who can come in and understand their North Star is the consumer, and will this scale?
And then, of course, you want them to be hardworking and collaborative because we're a very big organization across a lot of countries. Collaboration is absolutely key to being able to be successful.
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