Disney Streaming and the Global OTT Market
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Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: It's hard to think of a bigger global brand than Disney. So, obviously, Rebekah, Disney is coming at it from a slightly different perspective. What are your thoughts on one global market?
Rebekah Mueller: I think Disney's brands definitely resonate globally. That's what we've seen. It's very beloved. We made a really conscious choice when we were supporting, for example, new languages around the product to make them available globally. So if we have languages available for a piece of content, we allow our customers to experience that around the world. So if you speak French-Canadian and you're in Quebec, you're covered; or if you speak French-Canadian in Germany or Argentina, you can experience it as well. So we really try to bring our capabilities at a global standpoint, and we think of English and United States as just one country and one language of many that we support in our product.
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen: Could you talk a little bit about the process for launching a product or building, and then launching a product for international markets, as opposed to a domestic one? Do you take a fundamentally different approach, or is the approach the same at the foundation and you just tailor it at a higher level?
Rebekah Mueller: I think we were fortunate in that. When I joined the team, I was the first person on the team focused on the global expansion, and it was pre-launch of the product. So we can make some really strong architectural decisions.
What I mostly tell folks when they are thinking about taking a domestic product--whatever country that may originate from--and they're trying to take it outside of that country, a lot of the things that people are surprised about that they need to support are things that are hidden within products that you already use. And you don't realize it because you've had them for every product that you've experienced for the most part. For example, payments are different, and how people use payments. There are different legal requirements for payments. Or content or content ratings. There are different devices that people use, and different penetration of devices for streaming in different countries. There's different language support.
Think about Japanese. We're coming to Japan this fall. It's a meaning-based language, so it has core fundamental changes to how search works or how the language displays. But most people don't realize these things because you experienced the products that you have. And really, we know we're successful when you don't feel any friction in the product and it's just seamless. It's silent. Our success is just a seamless experience and you don't realize where it originates from.
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