That's text-book financial engineering. I understand the creators' concerns, especially the ones that signed contracts before Disney decided to create Disney+, but on the Disney side I really don't care. It's more, I'm explicitly hostile to it due to the balkanization of streaming platforms now that every big producers start to have their own end-user distribution, subscription-based service.
It’s not “financial engineering”. It’s standard managerial accounting. I’m an MBA drop out and studied this over 20 years ago (undergrad in CS. The dot com boom called my name). In most large organization, different departments are separated into “cost centers”. Managers are often responsible for their own profit and loss. Internal “costs” are assigned to departments working together.
Why should the Disney+ manager get credit for making $450 million in profit by causing Disney Movie Studios to lose $500 million? How is that good for the overall business? Again I’m completely making up numbers.
We had a method to pay one bill and get all of the content you wanted - it was called “cable”.
