Iger in first year casts wide net for Disney: Techno-Savvy CEO finds new avenues for growth.

If anything has characterized Robert Iger's first year as the chief executive officer at The Walt Disney Co. it has been a tenacity to embrace new technology to get company content to as wide an audience as possible.

Viewers no longer need to sit in front of a television set to watch the most popular shows on the Disney-owned ABC Television network but can see them on their iPod or home computer.

This month, Disney made available a library of 75 feature films through Apple's iTunes store and in less than a week there were 125,000 downloads generating $1 million in incremental revenue for company coffers.

"Clearly customers are saying to us they want content in multiple ways," Iger said during an appearance at the Goldman Sachs Communicopia XV Conference on Sept. 19.

Iger took over for a beleaguered Michael Eisner, the company head who rang in Disney's second golden age of feature animation with "The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast" only to have all the goodwill squandered away in public disputes with former Disney studios head Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Disney President Michael Ovitz and culminating in a shareholder's revolt led by Roy E. Disney, the nephew of Walt Disney, and his business partner Stanley Gold.

Roy Disney and Gold even challenged in court the process used to select Iger as the new chief executive but dropped the lawsuit several months later.

Officially in charge of the Burbank-based company on Oct. 1, 2005, Iger focused on three areas: increasing Disney branded content, use of new technology to deliver that content, and expanding into new overseas markets.

Quickly, Iger moved on the second of those goals as that fall Disney made available to iPod users episodes of its most popular ABC Televsion shows, including "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives."

Then in May, the company made four ABC shows available through online streaming for a trial period, a service to be repeated this fall.

By far the biggest deal during Iger's first year as Disney chief was the one announced in January with the acquisition of Pixar Animation Studios for $7.4 billion.

"Disney has proven that it was a successful time to be cutting edge on a lot of these things," said Gigi Johnson, a lecturer at UCLA Anderson School of Management's Entertainment and Media Management Institute.

In his comments at the Goldman Sachs conference, Iger said he sees growth in electronically delivered media and every time the company has tested the water that has proven to be true.

The ABC downloads made available last fall through Apple have not resulted in a drop in ratings for the most popular shows, Iger said, adding that "Lost" was the show with the most downloads.

"It suggests there wasn't a cannibalization effect," Iger said. "If anything maybe it kept 'Lost' more relevant because it touches more people."

For the four shows viewed at the ABC.com website, the company found once again no loss in ratings and that the average age of the streaming viewer was 29 years, much lower than the average age of the viewer of primetime television, Iger said.

The challenge for Disney is that all of these efforts are visible but bring in a very tiny portion of revenue to the company as a whole, Johnson said.

"Talking about 125,000 movie downloads is nice but not compared to how big the home video business is for them and how big the movie business is for them," Johnson said. "If these do prove to cannibalize they are going to have to scale up pretty fast to offset any loss in revenue."

Animation Model

In the four years since re-launching the "Strawberry Shortcake" line, DIC Entertainment has brought in $1.5 billion in retail revenues,

That figure would not have been possible without a new business model for animation where revenue streams that used to be afterthoughts are now considered from the start.

DIC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Andy Heyward described the model as the "360 degree approach" during a panel discussion at the 2006 Institute on Entertain Law and Business sponsored by the USC Gould School of Law and the Beverly Hills Bar Association.

To be successful with animation, a company needs to take a coordinated brand approach and get its content out in consumer products, home entertainment, publishing and online, Heyward said.

"You can't create a program first, get it into the marketplace and hope it gets some traction," Heyward said. "The marketplace is so fragmented you need to come at it from different directions."

Burbank-based DIC got the rights to the dormant "Strawberry Shortcake" brand in 2002 from American Greeting Cards. Immediately the company set about giving the character an updated look, created animated specials and new characters to broaden the storytelling possibilities.

DIC now works with 300 licensees to put out thousands of "Strawberry Shortcake" products targeted at its prime demographic of girls aged 3 to 5 years old, and the secondary demographic of mothers and grandmothers with daughters and granddaughters.

An animated feature film comes to theaters in October, Heyward said.

All the "Strawberry Shortcake" products, whether distributed by television, home entertainment, publishing or new media, "bounce" off one another, Heyward said.

Wireless Trade Show

Two San Fernando Valley companies took part in this year's trade show sponsored by CTIA--The Wireless Association at the Los Angeles Convention Center Sept. 12 and 13.

Sherman Oaks-based GoTV had an exhibit at the show to promote its line of shows, both original programming created from its studios and the licensed content.

GoTV has a variety of music, sports, news, and comedy programming for its subscribers.

Waat Media, also based in Sherman Oaks, used the show to announce that it and subsidiary Charismatix were forming a new parent company, Twistbox Entertainment.

Waat remains a subsidiary of Twistbox for late night adult entertainment programming available through mobile devices.

Staff Reporter Mark R. Madler can be reached at [phone] or at [e-mail].