I forgot to mention yesterday that if you buy a qualifying Panasonic Blu-ray player between now and the end of January 2009, Disney and Panasonic will give you Ratatouille and The Nightmare Before Christmas on Blu-ray for free.
Details on the Panasonic website are here.
Mine’s already in the mail. . .
Okay, so in response to what has been widely rumored, I’m not dead. Just toiling away as we near the end of a college semester in which I’m taking one of the worst classes I’ve every had in all my years of secondary education (and somehow I think I’m now over 10, sheesh).
Likewise, I’ve been on travel more in the last 3 weeks than in the last 6 months combined, so it’s slowed me down a bit here. The good news is I’ll have some observations from my recent business trip west where I got to spend the better part of a Sunday enjoying Disneyland with a work associate who worked for the Mouse in Florida before they closed down the Animation studio there. I’m saving that post until I get copies of the pictures Jim took, since stupid me left my camera back in my hotel room.
So I thought I’d give a quick discussion here about Blu-ray and Disney movies. I have to tell you that I have been a bit of a Blu-ray skeptic. Not because of the Blu-ray technology itself necessarily (though this whole profile business is just a mess frankly), but because of all the expense needed to truly get the best out of it.
Thanks however to some expiring airline miles, a little b-day money from a family member and a sale from Best Buy I picked up a Panasonic DMP-35K (the only stand alone player to receive a cnet.com Editor’s Choice) for basically sales tax ($18 and some change). My wife had also given me a copy of Sleeping Beauty on BRD for my b-day back in October because it came with the DVD version for free (and Netflix let me add Blu-Ray for a buck a month!).
After messing around with Sleeping Beauty last night, I have to give props to Disney – I’m impressed. Even on my 5 year old Sony rear projection set and my 6 year old Kenwood THX amp, it looks good and sound good. The biggest plus though for all us Disney dweebs are truly the extras.
Lots and lots and LOTS of extras.
Possibly even enough to justify the $30 average price if, you are like most of us, Disney extras junkies.
We’ve only scratched the surface of the ones on SB, but they are very well done. For instance, watching the commentary version of the movie takes advantage of Blu-ray’s ability to impose Picture-in-Picture like windows over the movie, and they use it too pretty good effect. Sometimes you see John Lasseter, Andreas Deja and Leonard Maltin as they talk, other times you see stills of things related to the movie (background art, opening day pictures, pictures of voice artists or even small movie quotes from animation greats like Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston and Eyvind Earle). I haven’t been able to get the BD*Live to work yet, but certain that was because of internet issues last night.
So overall I’d say Disney has really stepped up to the format if this is indicative of their plans for future releases. And I’m impressed have no buyers remorse about picking up the player either, which is good! The Panasonic gets high marks from me too.
I put off Blu-ray for quite sometime because my 5 year old equipment, while supporting HDMI and HDCP (through a DVI connector), only does 1080i and the amp only Dolby Digital/DTS. If you want the high end of Blu-ray capability you need a 1080p (or better a 1080p/24 set) and a Dolby True HD/DTS-HD receiver and speakers all interconnected with HDMI (and therefore HDCP). Oh, and don’t forget the need to have a player that supports BD 1.1 or better yet the 2.0 standard…
And that’s where Blu-ray has failed for me ultimately (and why I was a total skeptic). Too many acronyms for too many people like my Dad. Plus the upgrade cost to get there… I can’t possibly hope to drop $2,500 or so for a new flat screen TV, a new receiver and a Blu-ray player (to be on the low end at that) just to get what it has over what I’ve got, let alone someone like my father or grandmother for that matter.
So Disney is shrewd to throw more content on the discs, lots more content. Will that make people upgrade alone?
Probably not, but even for the skeptic in me (and my slightly less than top of the line specs by today’s standards) I’m still pretty happy I did.
It’s been a rough business week for the stock market, all of our retirement accounts, and Mickey’s stock price…
One of the more quiet announcements this week from Disney is the reinvigoration of the Disney Educational label at the Studios. You can learn more at http://dep.disney.go.com/index.html
Beyond that I’m off early in the morning EST to a conference on the west coast for most of the week, so it’ll be pretty quiet here for the moment. However, I hope tomorrow to run up and visit Disneyland for most of the day before I get swamped the rest of the week.
Hope to have some interesting things to talk about when I get back!
TTFN.
If you’ve every wondered what the music was that’s playing in the park or park areas at the Disney parks, then there is a new website for you!
The site has a list of most of the songs and tracks used through the parks now or in the past. If the song is available on iTunes or on Amazon, they also provide a link.
This is in addition to the other site I’ve used before and have in the Web-O-Sphere links on the right, www.disneymusicloops.com.
And if you just can’t stand it and have to listen to some Disney magic now, then get thee to www.mouseworldradio.com where you can listen to Mike Newell’s tracks from around the World streamed right to your desktop (and usually timed on the east coast to match the actual park loops for the day, so Illuminations plays at 9 PM EST for instance).
So I’ve had a little time to ponder the thoughts and facts from last weeks conference call for the end of FY ‘08 and projections for the FQ FY’09.
Here are some thoughts in no particular order:
1. Tom Staggs mentioned specifically that the average booking window for the vacation crowd has been about 12-14 weeks. That means most of us can’t think about a vacation any further out than 3-4 months. Disney requires full payment usually 45 days out, so we are barely doubling that window on average. We are SOO able to save and wait no?
Tom also mentioned that window has narrowed a little bit in the past month or so, but that it’s too early to draw any conclusions from it definitively.
That says to me that the $200 gift card offer is sized to target that booking window almost exactly (January 4th through March 29th is about 12 weeks eh? Coincidental? I think NOT!)
2. The discount is pretty cool, but as Tom noted is not unprecedented, and not even the biggest discount they’ve ever given. Disney usually has a pretty good discount deal in the winter through early months with discounted rooms from mid-January to mid-May, with some exceptions for spring break. So this deal isn’t that different other than maybe the timeframe is a little longer.
3. Mary Waring over at the fantastic website MouseSavers.com has a typical breakdown for the savings here. The Value Resort stayers, which Bob Iger said they figured this would really appeal too, get to save about $500 through the end of March and $300-ish through the end of June. Just to prove that this isn’t unprecedented, last falls free food deal for a typical family of 4 (2 adults, 1 junior and 1 child) over the same 7 day timeframe resulted in a savings of just over $900 at list price.
So I’d say the $200 kicker is a little higher than last year, but the overall discount is about the same on the core hotel room.
4. The theme park tickets are a cheap giveaway, since after a 4 day base ticket, 3 additional days is about $9 a ticket. You still have to pay full freight for the park hopper and the park hopper/more options if you have them, so frankly I’d consider this a wash.
But from a marketing standpoint I’d say it’s brilliant. Only the most ardent fan really keeps track of the fact that days after 4 are that cheap, even for the sporadic return visitor. Most people will look at the one day price and think they are getting a $75*3 days discount, so the PERCEIVED value of the package is greater than the REAL discount.
5. Do you notice how Disney has gone this past couple of year to really emphasizing the cost per person per night? This new promotion has great zingers like ‘That's like paying $46 a night per person for this package’. It’s like buying a car… ‘well Mr. Jones, what DO you need the payment to be for us to make this deal?’
Don’t get me wrong, it works and works well, but again it’s that soft marketing psychology of ‘see honey, that’s CHEAP!’
6. After the last 3-4 conference calls, I’ve determined that the studios and consumer products guys never get their true due unless something is going horribly wrong. There was a smattering of discussion about DVD sales and Bob and Tom both briefly mentioned the upcoming Studio slate in their prepared remarks, but it’s almost like those parts of the Company didn’t exist for the cabal manning the phones (who are these people anyway??? They ask some of the dumbest questions.) Otherwise, nothing about Andy’s positioning of product for the holiday season or Dick’s upcoming lineup for the theaters and how they think those will do. Zip. Zilch. Nada. *sigh*
7. As has been mentioned other places, it appears the DCA makeover is still a go despite anything in the economy (read that as already priced in to our forward looking capital-X budget plans, and has a high enough expected return on investment to make this a go even in this crap economy).
There is some interesting math buried in that discussion about how to roll the expenditures and then capitalize on incremental revenue as you upgrade parts of the park and get more people through the gate. My guess is this effort is engineered to pay for itself in not more then 2-3 FY’s after completion, if not sooner.
Disney has what I would consider a pretty average Return on Equity of 14%. In other words, if the project wasn’t expected to do at LEAST that well, then in general it wouldn’t be worth doing, and they wouldn’t be.
8. Bob and Tom both talked a lot about variable expenses and controlling them, especially in the parks. This is pretty self explanatory, but not always very obvious frankly.
For those of you without any background in accounting or finance, basically a fixed expense is something you have to pay regardless of how much or how little you use it, vice a variable expense that ‘varies’ with usage. The goal for most companies is to have as many variable expenses as possible and as few fixed ones, all things considered equal. That is because by definition you are in direct control of variable ones, but not the price of fixed ones.
If you stop to think about it for a second however, there are some things that make sense and some that aren’t so obvious. Frankly I think just about everything you and I can interact with at Disney World falls into the variable expense area, since most of those costs are directly related to the hours the parks are open and what venues are open.
9. Lastly, did you catch the part where Tom said that even though the company feels the stock is WAY underpriced from what they consider its intrinsic value, they have suspended stock buybacks for the moment? That’s first good cash management, but it’s probably also hammering stockholders by a few bucks a share on that $10 slide in the last 5-6 weeks, since a large buyer is out of the market for the moment on the sidelines.
Oh yeah, and before I forget, if you are waiting to find your dream job in professional services at this point, be prepared to wait… and wait… how long? Who knows.
The job count in Florida is down to less than 40 as of yesterday, and I’d bet you a paycheck that new hires that are coming on are being scrutinized and questioned at the HIGHEST levels of the Company.
That’s a suckers bet on your part though, so keep your money safe. . . trust me on this one.
It’s being rumored by several sites throughout the World Wide Web-o-sphere that Disney World isn’t looking to good for future booking right now. Disneyland is off too, but that’s old news at the moment since Bob and Tom talked about it at the 3rd quarter conference call back in September.
What IS new is the possible realization that future bookings in Florida aren’t holding up as well as they let on or knew at the time. So that either means that their average forward booking for a vacation in reality is only about 3-4 months (hence Mr. Staggs saying something to the effect that ‘through the end of the year bookings were in line with last year’), OR the model isn’t holding up in current economic conditions and people are cancelling more future vacations than usual (Disney is pretty lenient on their refund policy if you think about it, offering a booking for a very modest down-payment and only requiring full payment 45 days out).
I’d also offer as part of the discussion the following: in the last month, the greenback has strengthened considerably against almost any foreign currency you can name.
Here are some important examples (prices are American $1 to units of the foreign currency from Yahoo Finance):
| Country/Region | August 1st | November 3rd | Change |
| Canada | 1.02 Canadian | 1.20 Canadian | +17.65% |
| Euro Zone | .64 euro | .78 euro | +22.88% |
| Japanese Yen | 107.67 yen | 98.70 yen | -8.33% |
| U.K. Pound | .51 pound | .63 pound | 23.53% |
So as you can see, in all but the Japanese Yen case, the dollar has strengthened significantly in the last 3 months. That means that anybody coming to the US from those areas, on average, just took a 20% haircut to their money (seen another way they get 20% less greenback that they were 3 months ago).
So chances are, it’s not JUST U.S. booking that may be off, but international ones too… we’ll have to wait and see, though I don’t expect that to be addressed much on weeks conference call either.
Disney and Netflix announced a few weeks ago that they would work together to bring Disney movies to the Netflix instant view section. I believe the original announcements were for several of the popular Disney Channel shows, but way more than that has shown up recently.
Here are just a few of the full blown Disney movies you can now watch anytime you want on Netflix streaming:
I’m not certain at the moment if I’m seeing all of them or not. The reason is that Netflix just recently announced a beta for using Microsoft Silverlight to stream content through the web vice their current proprietary plugin. That’s in preparation for Netflix offering streaming through the XBOX 360 later this month.
The good news is that if you own a Mac, you can now also see Netflix movies as well as on a Windows PC.
The problem at the moment is that not all streaming movies that are in the proprietary form are available in Silverlight form. Once you sign up for the open beta though, you can’t go back.
So hence why I can’t see if there are other Disney movies that are on the service that just aren’t yet on the Silverlight side.
Regardless, if your a Netflix subscriber and a Mac user this is the ONLY way to watch streaming movies. Sign up for the beta here.
Happy streaming!
The Disney World Weather is:
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