“Similarly, we do not expect the launch of the advertising-supported tier of Disney+ in December to provide a more meaningful financial impact until later this fiscal year.”

In context

“arter relative to the third quarter. With our expectation that peak losses are now behind us, DTC operating results should improve going forward as we lay the foundation for a sustainably profitable business model. In the first quarter of fiscal 2023, we expect direct-to-consumer operating results to improve by at least $200 million versus the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, with larger improvement expected in Q2, reflecting a couple of key factors. First, our recently announced price increases across our Direct-to-Consumer offerings in the U.S. should begin to modestly benefit ARPU and subscription revenue in the first quarter. However, given that the Disney+ price increase will not go into effect until towards the end of Q1, this benefit will be realized more fully in the second quarter. Similarly, we do not expect the launch of the advertising-supported tier of Disney+ in December to provide a more meaningful financial impact until later this fiscal year. Additionally, our commitment to cost rationalization will allow us to scale effectively against our investments. In particular, while DTC programming and production costs will increase from Q4 to Q1 over the course of the year, content expense and OpEx growth should slow as we approach steady state and marketing costs should decline as we continue to focus on aligning our costs with our dynamic business models. As it relates to subscribers, we expect ESPN+ and Hulu will continue to add new subscribers in Q1, and we expect core Disney+ subscribers to increase only slightly in the quarter, reflecting tougher comparisons against Disney+ Day performance. As we’ve mentioned before, subscriber growth will not be linear each and every quarter, and the trend is driven by several factors, includin”