Hamilton, Disney+, and the Future of the Feature Film

The data in this story was originally featured by Rich Greenfield and Brandon Ross from LightShed Partners on August 10, 2020.

Hamilton increased Disney+ Sign-ups by 641% — but did they stick around?

Last week, we revealed Hamilton’s July 3rd release on Disney+ drove even more Sign-ups than initially reported. This is significant because Disney+ had recently suspended its free Trial, which was expected to slow demand.

Instead, we found a 641% increase in Sign-ups vs. prior weekends—all from Subscribers who paid at least $6.99. The resulting Sign-ups were far greater than previously free Sign-ups to Frozen 2 or Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

The future of feature films

As Rich Greenfield & Brandon Ross at LightShed put it: “Hamilton shows the power of putting a new feature film directly on SVOD, skipping theaters and all forms of transactional home entertainment.”

How do we value content in the new Streaming world, when traditional viewership numbers don’t suffice?

The answer is a “customer lifetime value equation.” An example for Hamilton and Disney+ might look like this:

• Number of new Subscribers generated *
• Which plan price those Subscribers chose *
• Which Distributor they purchased via (and therefore what the revenue share was) *
• How long they continued to stay Subscribed

ANTENNA’s data provides unique insight into each of these key elements of the customer lifetime value equation. For example, our data shows that the “Hamilton cohort” was 1.5X as likely to cancel Disney+ within the first month vs. the benchmark.

When this data is combined with Sign-up, Plan, and Distributor information, the new way to value marquee content on SVOD services begins to take shape.

COVID-19 has only accelerated the trend of Subscriber growth and Retention replacing Ratings as the most important indicators of success — and that phenomenon has never been more apparent than in the case of Hamilton.

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Rameez Tase is Co-Founder & CEO of ANTENNA, a measurement and analytics company providing insight into purchase behavior and subscription metrics across the new media landscape. Follow our newsletter to receive more insights, or visit this page if you’re interested in working together.