Liberty Media Chairman and legendary entrepreneur and investor John Malone says that although Disney has a great brand, what they don’t have is a massive number of direct consumer relationships.
John Malone, Liberty Media Chairman discussed Disney with CNBC’s David Faber:
Disney Doesn’t Have Massive Direct Consumer Relationships
Disney has a great brand, there’s no question, and they really know the entertainment business. What they don’t have is a massive number of global credit cards. They don’t have massive direct consumer relationships at this point, and those are not easy to come by. If you look at the other people in the space, Amazon because of their retailing businesses and the creation of Prime has been able to tie into consumer interest pretty globally. It’s very easy for Amazon to sell an incremental service.
Apple Has 650 to 700 Million Direct Consumer Relationships
You have Apple wanting to be in this space. Apple is the big gorilla. Apple is wanting to develop a direct consumer entertainment relationship beyond music. Let’s call it into video. We’re estimating that Apple has probably 650 to 700 million direct consumer relationships in which Apple has a credit card, a lot of information about the consumer. They’ve started to put money into original content and they’re certainly having lots of discussions in and around the content industry to figure this out. They want to drive their consumer interface technology, their ecosystem, into the video space in the living room more heavily than Apple TV has so far.
Jeff Bezos is on a Roll with his Fire Stick, Prime, and Content
Jeff (Bezos) is on a roll with his Fire Stick and his Prime and his content, so he’s in the living room and Alexa is a is a voice-activated interface that works well, is well thought-through, well-engineered, interfaces with Netflix. I mean well engineered. So the technology side, if Disney has a problem I believe it’s going to be those two things. It’s going to be the technology platform and it’s going to be establishing those one-to-one consumer relationships.