Inside Disney's Streaming Power Structure: The Execs Closing the Gap on Netflix

Disney's direct-to-consumer streaming business has undergone a remarkable transformation since the 2019 launch of Disney+, evolving from an expensive long-term gamble into a genuine profit engine. The company generated $582 million in streaming profits in its most recent quarter, a figure that underscores how dramatically the unit's financial profile has shifted. While Disney no longer publicly discloses its subscriber count, the company reported 196 million subscriptions as of late September 2025, a substantial base that forms the foundation of its competitive ambitions against Netflix.

CEO Bob Iger's successor in overseeing day-to-day priorities, Josh D'Amaro, has made streaming a central pillar of his strategic agenda. He has restructured the executive leadership around the direct-to-consumer business in significant ways. Dana Walden, previously the company's television chief, has been elevated to a newly created role as chief creative officer — the first person to hold that title in Disney's history — signaling a deliberate effort to align creative output more tightly with streaming distribution. Meanwhile, Adam Smith and Joe Earley have been named co-presidents of the DTC business, splitting responsibility for a unit that now spans Disney+ and Hulu.

Smith, who also serves as Disney Entertainment's chief of product and technology, arrived at the company in September 2024 after a tenure at YouTube, bringing with him a platform-side sensibility about user experience, engagement metrics, and technology infrastructure. His appointment reflects Disney's recognition that winning in streaming is as much a product and engineering challenge as it is a content one. Smith oversees eight direct reports, with Andre Rohe — Disney's Executive Vice President of Product Engineering — among the most consequential. Rohe has taken on the role of translating Disney's broader AI ambitions into concrete operational guidance for technology staff, including cautioning employees against indiscriminate AI tool usage. He has specifically warned against what he described as a counterproductive tendency to use AI tools regardless of whether they actually improve productivity, a mindset sometimes referred to internally as excessive reliance on token-heavy approaches.

One of the most closely watched initiatives under Smith's purview is Disney's AI-powered advertising tool for Disney+. In internal communications to streaming staff, Smith has described this project as one of the clearest areas of genuine traction within the company's broader technology push. The tool represents Disney's bid to make its advertising inventory more valuable and precisely targeted, which is particularly important as the ad-supported tier of Disney+ becomes an increasingly significant revenue lever. Smith has also briefed employees on the company's so-called super app ambitions — a vision for consolidating the Disney streaming experience into a more unified, feature-rich destination — and has disclosed organizational changes affecting the streaming commerce and data teams, suggesting ongoing structural refinement beneath the surface.

The convergence of Disney+ and Hulu is perhaps the most visible strategic move D'Amaro is pursuing on the product side. By bringing the two services closer together into a single destination, Disney aims to reduce subscriber confusion, improve content discovery, and extract more value from its combined content library without necessarily increasing costs proportionally. This bundling and integration strategy mirrors broader industry trends but carries particular significance for Disney given Hulu's distinct brand identity and its history of operating somewhat independently within the Disney ecosystem. The goal is a seamless one-stop streaming experience that can compete more directly with Netflix's all-in-one platform model.

On the viewership front, Disney's streamers have shown encouraging signs of momentum after a prolonged period of stagnation. Nielsen data tracking US television viewership shows Disney+ and Hulu achieving their highest combined monthly share in nearly three years in March 2026, followed by their strongest month relative to Netflix in close to a year. While these figures still represent a significant gap below Netflix's dominance, the trajectory marks a meaningful reversal. Retention metrics add further cause for optimism: fewer than 4% of Disney+ and Hulu subscribers canceled their subscriptions in May, according to data firm Antenna, making them the lowest-churn services in the industry aside from Netflix itself. This loyalty has persisted even through a succession of price increases, suggesting that Disney's content and brand proposition remain compelling enough to retain subscribers despite the higher cost.

Disney is also watching closely the industry-wide move toward short-form video, a format that Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, and others are experimenting with as a way to drive engagement and attract younger audiences accustomed to TikTok-style consumption. Disney's own exploration of short-form content within its streaming platforms reflects an acknowledgment that traditional long-form viewing habits are evolving and that platforms need to serve multiple consumption patterns simultaneously. How aggressively Disney pursues this format will likely depend on how it fits within the super app vision and whether it can be integrated without diluting the premium content brand Disney has carefully maintained.

The internal organizational structure Disney has built around its streaming product and technology functions reflects a company that is treating the engineering and product layers of its streaming business with the same seriousness it has historically reserved for its creative and theme park divisions. Smith's direct reports and the broader org chart beneath Rohe represent a significant concentration of technical talent and leadership bandwidth devoted to making Disney's streaming platforms faster, smarter, and more personalized. As competition in streaming intensifies and subscriber growth becomes harder to manufacture through new market expansion, the battleground is increasingly shifting to engagement, retention, monetization efficiency, and product quality — all areas where Disney's current leadership structure is explicitly designed to compete.