• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, June 11, 2025

Wondering why Walt Disney has not been involved in any discussions about spinning or selling off their cable networks -- as others have done?

Some of the answers come from the Disney decision announced yesterday to pay Comcast $438.7 million for the remaining stake in Hulu it doesn’t already own. Disney initially paid $8.6 billion to Comcast for Hulu.

“After a pretty lengthy process... we decided the best course for us to take is not only to buy Hulu in its entirety, but to hold on to the linear TV networks, and to integrate them seamlessly into our streaming business,” Bob Iger, CEO of Walt Disney told CNBC on Tuesday.

The benefits, he said, are to “aggregate” advertising and subscription fee revenues. And despite massive cord-cutting, he says there are enough subscribers to generate “significant revenue."

In addition, Disney gets cost savings when it comes to programming and production by having both Hulu and linear TV networks' ownership.

Marketing-wise, keeping linear TV networks and Hulu together also helps amass audiences for adverting purposes.

He says all this has raised its overall streaming businesses -- Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ -- into profitable positions in recent quarters.

Iger notes that while some are exiting the linear TV network business -- Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast Corp. -- he thinks Disney gains strength from being one of the few left standing.

In buying up the remaining part of Hulu, Iger believes it only adds to its stronger streaming assets versus other legacy media-owned platforms.

It is true that Disney has a better position than most in terms of overall streaming viewing. In Nielsen’s media distributor measure, Disney is second to YouTube in total viewing time, at 10.7% for April this year.

Looking at another measure that Nielsen provides -- that of just streaming platforms -- Disney leads over all other legacy media-owned businesses, with a 5.0% share. For Paramount Global, Paramount+ is at a 2.4% share, and NBC’s Peacock is 1.4% share.

Iger’s logic comes down to the long-term belief held by many that some significant part of the live, linear TV network viewing universe -- including its subscribers -- will remain.

The question is -- where will that land? Will it be 30 million or 20 million, down from its current 55 million?

Is that still a business -- even partly -- that someone wants to be in? Perhaps it will be a strange new alternative to streaming.