Last month’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! coincided with a doubling of subscriber churn rates on Disney+ and Hulu, according to the latest streaming report from Antenna.
Churn, the industry term for the number of subscribers canceling their service in a given period, hit 8% on Disney+ and 10% on Hulu. Their levels in August were 4% and 5%, respectively.
During the days-long Kimmel affair, a flurry of posts on social media, including from A-listers like Howard Stern, indicated that some Disney+ subscribers had opted to drop their service as a protest against Disney. ABC paused the show after a joke by Kimmel about Donald Trump supporters’ reaction to Charlie Kirk’s shooting death drew fierce backlash from Trump and his appointee to lead the FCC, Brendan Carr.
Monday’s report of September subscriber numbers was also accompanied by new Antenna data on initial traction for Fox One and ESPN’s new stand-alone service. Through September 30, ESPN hit 2.1 million signups and Fox One was at 1.1 million, the measurement firm said. Both outlets launched August 21.
The figures do not include existing Disney subscribers who switched to ESPN from other plans, or pay-TV subscribers who activated the services through an MVPD partnership, Antenna said. Fox Corp. and ESPN have both characterized the sports-focused services as complements to their traditional pay-TV businesses, declining to offer subscriber projections.
Sign-ups for the services, which are offered in a bundle, tend to spike around weekends. Fox One saw an especially big surge ahead of the September 14 NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, a rematch of last February’s Super Bowl.
The ESPN Unlimited and ESPN Select tiers are available as bundles with Disney+ and Hulu. Perhaps not surprisingly, Antenna said two out of three sign-ups came via a bundle.
In the Kimmel-Disney situation, which saw the show go dark for almost a week, several caveats apply to the date. During the standoff, Disney was also implementing previously announced price increases across its streaming portfolio. As a rule, price hikes always increase churn in the short term, although generally the math favors them for programmers in the longer run.
Additionally, it wasn’t just Disney seeing elevated churn in September. HBO Max hit 9% churn, up from 8% in August, and the weighted average of all services climbed to 7% from 6%, with Starz, Paramount+ and Apple TV all on the rise. That trend is in line with data from Nielsen on overall TV usage in September, annually a time when football has keyed a resurgence in pay-TV viewing and a pullback from streaming in recent years.
Antenna, which tracks subscriptions via a range of consumer and financial data, also found that sign-ups to Disney+ and Hulu in September rose not only from August but hit their highest level in five months. Disney has also said it expects to see sizable gains in subscribers thanks to wholesale deals with major distributors like Charter, which are integrating Disney streaming into their TV and broadband packages. Those incremental new subscribers are not reflected in Antenna’s data.
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