Walt Disney Co.

For quarter that ended June 27, the Walt Disney Co. posted a loss of $4.84 billion, or $2.61 per share, compared to a profit of 79 cents in the prior year quarter. Revenue fell 42% to $11.78 billion, missing analyst expectations of $12.39 billion, according to FactSet.

TVNewsCheck will present a virtualized 10^th Annual Women in Technology Awards presentation ceremony and immediately after it, a “Predictions for 2021” panel session featuring all six honorees talking about how widespread remote production and other developments this year are likely to affect technology in 2021. Honorees are (top, l-r): SMPTE’s Barbara Lange, WarnerMedia’s Lisa Pedrogo, Perspective Media’s Janet Gardner, (bottom, l-r): Avid’s Kate Ketcham, Latakoo’s Jade Kurian and Walt Disney Co.’s Sally Hattori. To attend the event on Monday, Oct. 19, at 4 p.m. ET, please register here.

Walt Disney Co. has dramatically slashed its advertising spending on Facebook Inc., according to people familiar with the situation, the latest setback for the tech giant as it faces a boycott from companies upset with its handling of hate speech and divisive content.

The fuboTV streaming service has finally nabbed ESPN for its sports-focused package offerings, while also retrieving a slew of Disney entertainment channels, including FX and NatGeo, after they were dropped following The Walt Disney Co.’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets last year.

Imperial’s David Miller cuts his rating to “underperform,” arguing stock gains have been “due simply to excitement around the prospects of the domestic theme parks re-opening.”

Criminal Minds may be off the air now, but the Walt Disney Co., CBS and a Pretorian guard of executives from the long running series are now looking down the barrel of a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

The National Basketball Association is having what it terms “exploratory conversations” with the Walt Disney Co. about resuming its postponed season. The league issued a statement Saturday on its Twitter account. If the talks bear fruit, the season would resume in late July at Disney’s ESPN complex in Orlando, Fla., as a “single site for an NBA campus for games, practices, and housing,” the statement said.

Rebecca Campbell, whose promotion to Disney’s chairman of Direct-to-Consumer & International on Monday put her in charge of Disney+, Hulu, Hotstar and ESPN+, took a less-traveled road the to the C-suite. During the bulk of her 23 years at the company, Campbell focused on local broadcasting, running individual stations and the ABC Owned Television Stations Group, which has stations in New York, Los Angeles and six other markets.

The Walt Disney Co. has raised nearly $11 billion in a new debt offering as it continues to deal with the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic on its worldwide businesses.

In Disney’s fiscal second quarter, broadcasting revenues increased 49% to $2.8 billion, largely due to the consolidation of assets acquired from 21^st Century Fox, but also due to gains at the legacy broadcasting operations. In addition to the previously mentioned ad sales gain, ABC also benefitted from higher affiliate revenue (retrans for the O&O stations and network reverse-comp). But things are much more complicated in this current quarter.

Disney managed to muscle out a fiscal second quarter with total revenue of $18 billion edging Wall Street estimates, but adjusted earnings per share fell far short of the bar, showing the toll of COVID-19. Adjusting for items, earnings came in at 60 cents a share. Analysts had been expecting 88 cents a share and revenue of $17.81 billion, according to Refinitiv. Disney has been among the hardest-hit entertainment companies during the pandemic.

In a filing Monday with the SEC, Disney said that it had signed a new 364-day revolving credit agreement with Citibank that would provide access to as much as $5 billion. The agreement, which matures on April 9, 2021, can be extended for an additional year with the lenders’ consent.

The former CEO thought he was riding into the sunset. Now he’s reasserting control and reimagining Disney as a company with fewer employees and more thermometers.

Disney announced on Wednesday that Disney Plus, its new video service, now has more than 50 million subscribers. That’s almost twice as many as Disney reported on Feb. 4, when it said in its 1Q earnings that Disney+ reached 26.5 million subs during the quarter. Shares of Disney jumped as much as 7% on the news in after-hours trading.

The Walt Disney Co. said on Monday that executive chairman Robert Iger will forgo his entire salary and recently named CEO Bob Chapek will take a 50% pay cut amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to an email from Chapek sent to employees obtained by The Hollywood Reporter.

Fitch Ratings has put The Walt Disney Co. on credit watch, with a negative outlook, over concerns about how the Hollywood studio will weather the coronavirus outbreak in the near term.

Mmedia companies have begun to formulate their short-term ad sales strategies, with Disney becoming the first to publicly share its plans. They include pointing its live sports advertisers to other programming in its portfolio, including Good Morning America and its Freeform original series.

Walt Disney is looking to sell TrueX, an advertising-technology company it absorbed as part of its $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets last year, according to people familiar with the matter.

A large minority of Walt Disney Co. shareholders who cast votes at the company’s annual meeting on Wednesday opposed the company’s executive pay plan, Disney said. Disney said 46% of votes were cast against the plan and 53% in favor of the plan, with 1% abstaining. The vote is advisory and non-binding.

Fox Corp. said it will be skipping the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference where Lachlan Murdoch was scheduled to present Wednesday. It said the decision “was made out of an abundance of caution due to evolving public health concerns regarding COVID-19.” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CFO David Wehne, who were going to present today, were also no-shows. Disney executive chairman and until recently CEO Bob Iger was also slated for today but Disney canceled.

After transforming ABC, Disney’s outgoing CEO made four big acquisitions that changed the company forever.

In a surprise announcement Tuesday afternoon, Walt Disney Co. said longtime CEO Bob Iger was stepping down immediately, to be succeeded by Bob Chapek, most recently chairman of Disney’s parks, experiences and products business. Iger will remain executive chairman through the end of his contract on Dec. 31, 2021. Besides leading the board, Iger said he will spend more time on Disney’s creative endeavors.

Media stocks and all major U.S. stock market indices were slammed Monday morning as coronavirus concerns heightened. Walt Disney was down 3.8% to $133.71, while ViacomCBS lost 4% to $27.13 and Sinclair Broadcast Group fell 5% to $27.47. In digital media, Google gave up 3.7% to $1,430, while Facebook was off 3.6% to $202.64, Amazon was down 3.5% to $2,022, Netflix sank 3.4% to $367.48, Apple was off 3% to $303.53, and Roku went backwards 3.6% to $115.09.

Disney’s legacy ABC businesses were down for the quarter, although the company didn’t offer specific details. A bright spot was an increase in affiliate revenue (retrans for the O&O stations and the ABC Network’s share of what affiliates received), which was attributed to higher rates. But the broadcasting segment had lower advertising revenues for the quarter, with ad sales down for the O&Os and a drop in average network viewership.

The company says it has 26.5 million Disney Plus subscribers as of Dec. 28, the end of its first fiscal quarter. The service launched in November, and Disney has positioned it as the future of the company as more people drop their cable subscriptions in favor of online video services like Netflix. The company’s broadcasting arm’s revenue rose 34% to $2.6 billion.

20th Century Fox, a name and klieg-lit logo that stretches back 85 years in Hollywood, is dropping the word Fox, a move that may prevent consumers mistakenly thinking the movie studio has anything to do Rupert Murdoch’s polarizing Fox News media empire. It also dropped the Fox moniker from art-house sibling Fox Searchlight.

There are more than 10 million reasons why The Walt Disney Co. chairman and CEO Bob Iger is Multichannel News’s executive of the year for 2019. The first 10 million are the larger-than-expected number of people who signed up for the Disney+ streaming service on Nov. 12, the first day it was available.