Disney pares streaming losses, takes hit from India deal

livemint.com:

Disney is getting closer to its goal of breaking even in streaming this year, paring direct-to-consumer losses in its first quarterly earnings since Chief Executive Bob Iger fended off dueling proxy campaigns. The media giant’s streaming unit lost $18 million in the March quarter, an improvement from a $659 million loss in the year-earlier quarter. Iger said the company is on track to achieve streaming profitability in the final quarter of the fiscal year that ends in September.

The company’s flagship Disney+ streaming service—home to movies such as “Wish" and TV shows including “Bluey"—added more than six million customers in the March quarter, meeting a rare subscriber forecast it provided investors in February. Iger is in the throes of building a streaming-centric future for the entertainment giant as cable viewership declines. He has spent the past year aggressively cutting costs, modernizing ESPN and reinvigorating Disney’s studios after box-office stumbles.

As part of that right sizing, Disney merged its Star India operations—which includes its TV networks and the Hotstar streaming service—into a new joint venture with Reliance Industries and Viacom18. The company took a roughly $2 billion charge in the March quarter related to the India deal and to its linear television networks and swung to a loss of $20 million, from net income of $1.27 billion a year earlier. Companywide revenue rose about 1% to $22.08 billion in the March quarter.

Disney bought the India business in 2019 as part of its $71.3 billion acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox’s global entertainment assets. It was considered a crown jewel of the deal, largely because of several key packages of cricket rights that Star held. When the company lost