The Disney Grooming Syndicate has already suffered three rounds of brutal layoffs this year, and a new report says that’s not the end of it.
Tee hee.
“Disney is planning a restructuring of its television operation that’s expected to result in hundreds of layoffs and the consolidation of divisions, according to people familiar with the matter,” reports the far-left Wall Street Journal. “A primary goal for the TV reorganization is to structure the business in a way that makes sense for streaming customers, rather than … linear [i.e., broadcast and cable] television.”
On the linear side…
Disney outright owns the ABC TV (broadcast), plus eight affiliate stations.
Disney also owns these seven cable networks: The Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FX, FXX, and FXM (The Fox Movie Channel).
Disney owns a majority share (about 75 percent) in three National Geographic cable networks, and about 80 percent of five ESPN networks and three additional sports networks.
Then there is Disney’s half-ownership in A&E, History, Lifetime, and LMN.
So why am I burying you in all these details? To get my required word count up? Yes. To show off my Grok skills? Yes. But also to make the following point…
Disney owns or partially owns around 25 linear TV outlets and only four streaming services (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Select, and ESPN Unlimited). But what is Disney gearing up for…? Streaming. It’s streaming all the way down, baby.
Why?
Well, look at the average primetime, Live+7 viewership numbers for most of these Disney networks throughout 2025:
- ABC 4,040,000
- ESPN 1,970,000
- ESPN2 300,000
- FX 280,000
- Freeform 220,000
- National Geographic 180,000
- FXX 120,000
- Disney Channel 110,000
- Nat Geo Wild 80,000
- Disney Junior 70,000
- FXM 50,000
- ESPNU 40,000
- ESPN Deportes 30,000
- Disney XD 20,000
Nobody is watching this crap.
The Disney Channel mothership averages only 110,000 viewers!
How do you sustain an entire network when fewer than 100,000 turn in on average, which is true for six of them?
Well, this all goes back to what I’ve been writing about for the last 15 years: how cable and satellite TV rip off the consumer by forcing them to pay for networks they never watch. The reason some of you dummies are still paying $150 a month for TV is due to you being forced into exorbitant channel packages. You can’t choose only the networks you watch because they come with 100 other networks you never watch, and many of those networks enjoy a piece of your cable bill. This is called a carriage fee. Whether you watch or not, these leftist outlets (like CNN and MSNBC) are sustained by forcing you into expensive cable packages.
Something else I’ve been writing about for 15 years is how the death of cable TV (as people move to streaming) means the death of these cable networks. They obviously can’t survive on merit (i.e. advertising revenue based on viewership). So, as people cancel their cable packages and move to streaming, that means less money each month in carriage fees, which means these basement-rated networks cannot be sustained.
Cable is dying. Linear Disney sucks and cannot survive on merit. Less money is coming in from the grift that is cable TV. Therefore, the future is streaming.
Yeah, well, maybe not, at least not for the likes of Disney…
The future is user-generated content, and over the next few years, as AI becomes more affordable, this content will swamp everything else because the entertainment industry is more interested in shaming, queering, and insulting its audience than inspiring and entertaining us. This is already happening…
Disney+ and Hulu have 196 million worldwide subscribers, whereas YouTube has 2.7 billion — with a “B” — monthly users.
YouTube is watched more than any other network or platform, with 14.2 percent of TV time (not including minutes watched on the phone, tablet, or desktop). Disney is closer to five percent.
Once AI allows Normal People to produce entertainment for Normal People with the same production values as Hollywood, everything will change.