Disney sales figures for iTS videos announced

Silicon Alley Insider noted that Disney CEO Bob Iger announced some numbers for video and movie sales via iTunes since the 2006 launch. With about 4 million movies delivered via the store, and another 40 to 50 million video/TV show sales, that's a lot of bits. SAI isn't impressed, though; writer Peter Kafka runs the math and comes up with a revenue number of about $123 million — not a blip on the screen for the conglomerate that shelled out $7.4 billion for a renegade animation studio with a notoriously idiosyncratic part-time CEO.

What Kafka does acknowledge, and what makes digital delivery via iTunes worth Disney's while (other than the obvious "Steve told us to do it"), is that this is incremental revenue that Disney probably wouldn't have captured otherwise — Netflix or Blockbuster would have gotten the rentals, and relatively few DVDs would have been purchased to make up the digital slack. What did the revenue numbers look like in the first years of the VCR, DVD or cable pay-per-view offerings? Probably also on the less-substantial side, and yet those businesses are gigantic today.