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Disney’s linear channels “may or may not be part of the company” in the future, Mayer said Tuesday.
By Alex Weprin
Media & Business Writer
Disney CEO Bob Iger has “his hands full” with challenges, from an activist investor in Nelson Peltz, to big strategic decisions regarding Hulu and Disney’s linear channels, to setting a strategy for the future of the company.
It is with that context in mind that Candle Media CEO and former top Disney executive Kevin Mayer says he was welcomed back into the Disney fold as a strategic adviser to Iger.
“I can’t tell you what advice I’m giving to Bob and I suppose to the board, but, look, he needed some part of his team back,” Mayer said, speaking at the Yahoo! Finance Invest conference in New York on Tuesday morning. “He came back to a company that had vastly changed. The previous leadership under Bob Chapek had been making some decisions that probably Bob Iger would not have taken if he was CEO … But when you come back into a situation where there’s a massive change from when you left and the team that you’ve had before, and relied on before, were gone. It left them in a position where he really wanted to have some people that he trusted, you know, tell him what they thought, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not spending an enormous amount of time, but I was at the company for a long time.”
Iger, Mayer says, was one of the “best CEOs in American history” and felt like he had an obligation to return to Disney. Iger was disappointed “to see the company not live up to the standards that he had set forth, so stepping back into it was something I think he felt that he had to do.”
As for Iger’s priorities, ESPN is at the top of the heap.
“He’s definitely most focused on making sure that ESPN, a company that he really believes in strongly, is well positioned for the future,” Mayer told Yahoo’s Alexandra Canal, adding that when it comes to looking for partners, “we want to have content partners who can really strengthen our hand and allow us to create multiple tiers of offerings. And we want to have distribution partners.”
But Iger is also focused on what comes next for Disney, once the “uncertainty” around the company’s linear networks are settled.
“It depends on how Bob Iger ends up reconfiguring [the company], it really does,” Mayer said. “It could be a Disney that has a majority ownership of ESPN with some really great partners, still running ESPN in an over-the-top service and in the bundle.”
As for the rest of Disney’s linear channels, like Freeform, Disney Channel and ABC:
“Those may or may not be part of the company,” Mayer said. “Maybe they’re put in some sort of joint venture, you can imagine all sorts of different dispositions for those assets, but then you’re left with the core of the company, which I think is an amazing core.”
“You have Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar, the core brands … and you have the franchises that exist beneath those brands. They’re all there. And they’re hugely powerful business platforms,” he added. “There’s streaming, which I think will be profitable very, very soon … their theme parks. People forget about consumer products, which is a massively profitable business for the Walt Disney Company.”
And there’s one area that Disney is not a major player in, but which Mayer thinks it should look into.
“Games is the one place where I think Disney has not yet made a substantial investment,” he said. “It’s also a place where people can interact with or spend a lot of time with their favorite characters in context … So gaming is the last big sort of business platform. You plug that into those core assets, and no matter what happens to those linear networks, you have a really great growth trajectory.”
As for the future of Candle Media, Mayer acknowledged that with Blackstone as a backer, there will eventually be an exit, be it an IPO “when the time is right,” a “strategic” sale to a larger entertainment company or even a sale to another private equity firm.
“Who knows, maybe KKR owns us in three years,” Mayer quipped.
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