Back in the spring of 2015, Richard Plepler was the CEO of HBO — and, as it turned out, something of a streaming pioneer. Under Plepler’s leadership, and with a big boost from the fifth season of Game of Thrones, the company had just launched HBO Now, which at the time stood as the most ambitious direct-to-consumer streaming service yet from a legacy media company — and would eventually morph into Max. While its early user base was small — fewer than a million paid customers nearly a year after its debut — Now caught the attention of HBO’s media frenemies, all of whom knew the switch from linear TV to streaming was unavoidable. “Every executive in our industry was thinking about this transition,” Plepler says. Among the suits paying close attention to HBO Now: Disney CEO Bob Iger.
Like Plepler, Iger had obviously been thinking about how Disney should respond to the growing threat posed by pure streaming platforms like Netflix. But building such a platform would require the sort of tech prowess that a content company like Disney — or, for that matter, HBO — simply didn’t have. Plepler had solved the problem by contracting with a company called BAMTech, which years earlier had helped Major League Baseball stream its games. And so not too long after Now debuted, Iger reached out to Plepler. “On my way to the airport, my phone rang, and it was Bob,” says Plepler, who now runs the Apple TV–based Eden Productions (Black Bird, Franklin). Iger “wanted our verdict on our partnership with BAMTech.” Plepler raved about the company’s work, and by August 2016, Disney had become a minority investor in BAMTech. Exactly one year later, it took a majority stake in the company — and Iger announced the Mouse House’s pivot to streaming, along with what would eventually become Disney+.
How the Mouse House decided to evolve from a content creator to a content creator that is also a tech company is the focus of the sixth and final episode of Land of the Giants: The Disney Dilemma. Hosted by Vulture TV reporter and Buffering columnist Joe Adalian, the episode dives into the economic pressures that forced Disney to abandon a long-successful business model for something substantially more risky, and how that strategy has evolved in the five years since Disney+ debuted in November 2019.
