The Walt Disney Company saw its revenue increase during the last three months of 2024, brought on by price increases across some of its streaming services and an influx in cash from its sports businesses.
During its first fiscal quarter (Q1) of 2025, Disney earned $27.4 billion from its various operations, including streaming platforms, sports businesses, television broadcast channels and networks, and theme parks. The company’s Q1 coincides with calendar Q4 2024, which ended December 31.
Disney saw a modest bump in the number of customers who pay for its two flagship streaming services, Disney Plus and Hulu, with a total count of 178 million subscribers. The figure was up by 900,000 paid accounts compared to Q1 2024 (coincides with calendar Q4 2023), but Disney Plus logged a standalone loss of 700,000 subscribers to end the period with 124.6 million, marking one of the first financial quarters that the service did not grow its customer base.
Disney attributed losses at Disney Plus to price adjustments effectuated last October, which saw the cost of Disney Plus increase to $10 per month with ads and $16 per month for commercial-free streaming. The cost of Hulu’s ad-supported plan matched that of Disney, with an ad-supported bundle of the two service charged at $11 per month. The ad-free bundle of Disney Plus and Hulu now costs $20 per month, and the standalone ad-free subscription Hulu is now priced at $19 per month.
The company is not alone in raising subscription prices — other services like Netflix, Comcast’s Peacock and Paramount Plus with Showtime have done the same over the years. Over time, most of those services have seen customers move to ad-supported plans, which are priced substantially lower than commercial-free options, and which allow entertainment companies to draw on dual sources of revenue.
Hulu has offered an ad-supported platform for years, and industry analysts generally consider the service — which originally launched as a joint venture between Disney, Fox and NBC only to be acquired outright by Disney over the years — to be among the more-mature ad-supported streaming platforms relative to its peers.
But Hulu has also been criticized for having a higher ad load compared to its peers, with streamers watching more ads per hour of Hulu content compared to Netflix or even Disney Plus. As more Hulu content becomes integrated into Disney Plus through a dedicated content tile, the practice of running more spots on Hulu has also affected the co-owned streaming service.
The higher number of ads, compared with the high cost to stream content without them, may have convinced some customers to simply drop their Disney Plus subscription altogether. In rare cases, some customers may have moved on from Disney Plus in favor of Hulu, which has significantly more content thanks to licensing agreements with third party broadcasters and distributors.
“The surprising loss of Disney Plus subscribers — the first decline since its 2019 launch — raises red flags about saturation in a crowded market and the trade-offs of its pricing strategy,” Jesse Cohen, a senior financial analyst at Investing.com, told the website Fast Company.
Disney has also churned out fewer hits over the years, and even less of them have appeared on Disney Plus, with its critically-acclaimed series “The Bear,” “Only Murders in the Building” and “Shogun” only accessible to Disney Plus subscribers if they bundle the service with Hulu. While Disney Plus did hold the designation of airing the most-streamed series in 2024 (“Bluey,” a cartoon imported from Australia) based on Nielsen data, it was the only program from the service to make the top 10 list.
