Rosen is the author of Medium Shift, tracking the transformations underway in the media business.
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I was putting the finishing touches on a different column when the surprise news of Robert Iger’s return to Disney broke. That column was contemplating whether any of the major public media companies have the right leadership to right their floundering ships. On Sunday night, the board of Disney announced that they didn't.
Iger is replacing Bob Chapek, whom Iger himself chose as his successor and anointed in another surprise announcement almost three years ago. Chapek’s ambitious pitch for Disney+’s future looked and sounded an awful lot like Amazon Prime’s present. As I wrote a few months ago, “Once a user has downloaded either Disney+ or Amazon Prime, they’ve taken a number of steps that tell those brands they are open to a deeper direct-to-consumer relationship that can be nurtured in ways both obvious (such as sales of consumer products) and less obvious (such as gaming).”