“we continue to expect growth in the back half of the fiscal year to exceed growth in the first half.”

In context

“bscribers from our strategic decision to include Disney+ and ESPN+ as part of a Hulu Live subscription. In international markets, excluding Disney+ Hotstar, we added 5.1 million paid subscribers, primarily driven by growth in Asia Pacific and European markets. I'll note that growth in Asia included the benefit of new market launches in South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong in the quarter. Finally, we were able to resume growth in Disney+ Hotstar markets with 2.6 million paid subscriber additions in the quarter. Overall, we are pleased with Disney+ subscriber growth in the quarter and are looking forward to new market launches and a strong content slate later this year. As I've previously shared, we don't anticipate that subscriber growth will necessarily be linear from quarter-to-quarter, and we continue to expect growth in the back half of the fiscal year to exceed growth in the first half. At ESPN+, we ended the first quarter with over 21 million paid subscribers versus 17 million in Q4. Results decreased compared to the prior year as growth in subscription revenue was more than offset by higher sports programming costs driven by the NHL and LaLiga. And at Hulu, higher subscription revenues versus the prior year were partially offset by higher programming and production costs driven by increased affiliate fees for live TV. Hulu ended the first quarter with 45.3 million paid subscribers, inclusive of 4.3 million subscribers to our Hulu Live digital MVPD service. Moving on to content sales, licensing and other. Results decreased in the first quarter versus the prior year to an operating loss of $98 million, driven by lower theatrical results and higher film impairments, parti”