DeSantis' Twitter glitch, ESPN streaming, MoviePass tiers: Top stories

Yahoo Finance Live and YouTube Host Matt Kohrs examines several of the day's trending stories, including the Twitter glitch that impacted Governor Ron DeSantis' campaign announcement, Disney's reshuffling of ESPN content, and MoviePass' nationwide subscription service.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Let's take a look at some of the top trending stories of the day. We have Matt Kohrs, host of the Matt Kohrs show, alongside Yahoo Finance's Josh Schafer and Alexandra Canal. Let's get into it. First up, we got to talk about the Twitter debacle. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's big plan to announce he's running for president on Twitter last night.

Well, that ran into some technical issues. Elon Musk wanted to host this call on Twitter Spaces, but there was lots and lots of trouble. David Sacks' Craft Ventures, a co-founder here, had to take over hosting duties for a little bit of time. Let's take a listen to what some of that back and forth sounded like between Musk, Sachs, and DeSantis.

DAVID SACKS: Governor DeSantis, are you there? Can you hear us? I think you're breaking.

RON DESANTIS: I'm here.

DAVID SACKS: I know. I think I think you broke the internet there. We had over half a million people in one Twitter Space, and it was growing by 50,000 a minute. So congrats on breaking the internet there.

RON DESANTIS: Well, yeah. You try new things. You're going to-- it's adventurous.

ELON MUSK: You can tell by some of the mistakes that it's real.

SEANA SMITH: So you can see. Obviously, it did not go as planned. It was, I thought, an interesting idea, a unique idea, Matt. But it was over 20 minutes that those technical difficulties persisted. And by the time that DeSantis came on to announce, only about half the people that had initially been logged on were still watching or listening.

MATT KOHRS: I was trying to stream the whole thing and fill in that 20 minutes of dead air. I didn't know what was going. But it was interesting. In a weird way, I felt like I expected it.

Of course, it was going to be huge numbers, record-breaking, but the news was all super negative just like an absolute embarrassment and that type of stuff. And it got to the degree that he took down Twitter. So in a weird way, it's a pro and a con.

So I think there was a lot of backlash, impressive numbers, but then I was thinking about the real size of it. You need 70, 75 million votes to win. We didn't even get to a million. So I think there's a couple of ways you can interpret it fairly.

JOSH SCHAFER: I think it's interesting just to see how many people are willing to go on Twitter Spaces that quickly. The fact that you can get 600,000 people, I think, is pretty impressive when you consider how many people use Twitter and to be on Twitter live at that time.

Matt, I was curious, from a social media perspective, how much does that 20 minutes matter, you think? When you go-- if you go live on YouTube, are people waiting at exactly 7 o'clock or do you feel like people are joining at 7:02, 7:05? How does that part even work?

MATT KOHRS: I think with this, maybe that's why it felt like less negative to me. Because people expect that. It really wasn't like, on TV, if there's a big announcement, we expect the time. But half the time when I'm waiting for the President to make an announcement, I still have to kill another 20 minutes. So that's just the natural delay in politics. And I don't know why this one was any different.

JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah, Twitter Spaces, I do think have a lot of potential moving forward. Josh Farley, the Ford CEO, he's going on--

SEANA SMITH: Jim.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Jim Farley, excuse me. I was looking at Josh Schafer and saying Jim Farley. He's going on with Elon Musk later today. So I think there's a lot of potential there. I miss the video aspect, maybe because I'm a video person, I'm a visual person. It'd be great if they could find a way to maybe incorporate some videos, some remote video on them.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, that is a very good point there. But I also think it is a pretty smart marketing player, at least just getting more and more attention on Twitter. Because clearly, Musk has made a number of changes.

He's been struggling to really regain some of the user control that has been lost or really people no longer going to Twitter using Twitter like they did. So the fact that he has brought Twitter in the headlines once again, he's now holding this shot with the CEO of Ford, it makes a heck of a lot of sense if he's able to execute this well.

JOSH SCHAFER: Well, and it's what Twitter was doing before Musk bought it when you really think about their interest in Spaces over the last couple of years and how they've tried to build out that product. This is a product that Twitter was bullish on before Elon bought it. Because of the town square aspect that you can get with it, you can call people up, you can talk to them.

I know sports was very interested in it, because it was almost like Sports Radio where you can have callers come up and they can talk, and then you can make them hang up, and you have control over it. I think it's a really fun part of the social media. And it's interesting to see what Elon is going to be able to do with it. If you keep having these big names, though, it does seem like they might keep having a couple of tech issues.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, a lot of tech issues. They may make some changes there. That's for sure.

JOSH SCHAFER: But we're talking about Ron DeSantis. And I want to talk about the company that he's been fighting against a little bit here, Disney. And there was an interesting note out from Citi regarding Disney and specifically what Disney could do with ESPN. So Citi calling and saying that if Disney-- or sorry, if Disney would remove ESPN's content, all the ESPN+, that would be worth $20 a share for Disney shareholders.

And they're putting a $22 price tag per month on ESPN+. That's the projection that Citi says Disney should put on ESPN+. And that's what catches my eye here, is $22 obviously bigger than what most streaming-- what you pay for most streaming platforms. But I don't know. Allie, you're streaming expert.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah. I was shocked by that. That's the profit-maximizing price. $22 to me feels not like that much, especially when you compare it to something like YouTube TV. Obviously, that's a totally different product, you have a lot more channels available.

But that's $73 a month. And I feel like a lot of the people I know who signed up for YouTube TV do that solely for the sport. So I think there's even more runway here for ESPN+, if it goes fully over the top, to maybe bump that price up a little bit more and make that transition from linear to streaming that much easier.

MATT KOHRS: They also just signed one of the biggest streamers on YouTube, Pat McAfee. He cut his FanDuel deal moving over there. So he's literally one of the biggest people, so that's going to bring quite a few-- and then even if you look at risk-reward, Disney's been coming down.

It's around 88. Major support at 80. It could go all the way back up to 200. So if you're just looking at a basic risk-reward paradigm, it is a very interesting play.

SEANA SMITH: Certainly. And I was going to say it's been struggling now for quite some time. And I also think it's interesting in terms of what Citi said was the two lion's share, I guess, drivers here to the upside.

Because Citi says it's sports fans that had already cut the cord that are relying on ESPN+, which currently does not show the NFL or NBA games, which we know is a massive revenue driver and is what is keeping some people from cutting the cord. But that higher average per revenue user, average revenue per user number that they could potentially get from those existing ESPN+ subs, that could potentially make a real difference here in terms of Disney's future with streaming.

JOSH SCHAFER: But when you think about sports, everyone always talks about how you can make so much money off those fans. You can get them to pay more to go to an in-person experience, you can get them to pay more for apparel, you can get them to pay more for streaming.

And I don't think ESPN has really pushed the button there yet. So it'd be interesting to see how far they can get people to go. I know, personally, I'm not going to miss games. You're going to pay for it eventually at some point.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, and people are die-hards. They don't want to miss their favorite team.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah, sports fans are hardcore. And you also have a certain sector of the population that are movie buffs, and they are pretty hardcore as well. MoviePass is launching nationwide today ahead of Memorial Day weekend.

And guys, we know this company has been through a lot since emerging from bankruptcy. We now are in the MoviePass phase 2, if you will. I'm curious if you guys would be interested in signing off.

But this is going to be available. You can sign up through different types of tiers. They range in plans from $10 a month to see one to three movies in a month to up to $40 a month to see 30 movies. Now, they give you credits. So you can use these credits to see certain titles. But the big issue is--

SEANA SMITH: 30 movies, that's a movie a day. That's a heck of a lot of time.

MATT KOHRS: Yeah.

JOSH SCHAFER: Yeah.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Now, I'm assuming that would probably be a low credit film. That'd be if you're someone that likes the Indies, maybe those that aren't as popular. You can imagine something like Disney's The Little Mermaid, which is out this weekend, that's going to be higher amount of credits. But you have to wonder if the industry has enough movies in the pipeline.

MATT KOHRS: I think you still-- you have to be so obsessed with movies to even do the $10 a month when it seems like just for two movies a month?

SEANA SMITH: That's a lot. But it's cheaper than it would maybe potentially cost you just to go to one movie. That would be my, "I would never do this."

MATT KOHRS: That's a fair point.

SEANA SMITH: But that would be my argument for why this could maybe succeed this time around.

JOSH SCHAFER: But I wouldn't even go and see one movie a month right now, I don't think. I'd go and see movies when they come out, and I definitely like to go to the movies. But I haven't been to a movie in a little over a month now. I went and saw Air, and I don't know what I'm going to see next. I guess I would see Mario-- wait, I don't-- you try and play it out in your head, and you're like, how many movies would you go see?

ALEXANDRA CANAL: It would force you to, I guess. Yes.

JOSH SCHAFER: I don't know.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: I mean, I think it's a great time to drop it with the summer because we're going to have a new Transformers movie, a new Indiana Jones. I'm sure there's a couple of Marvel movies coming out. John Wick was out there. And that's--

SEANA SMITH: Barbie.

MATT KOHRS: Yeah, Barbie is coming out. So I think it's a smart time to drop it. And also, what was it? Circa 2016, 2017? When was that-- it was kind of viral for a moment there. Everyone was talking about it.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: MoviePass fans loved MoviePass. That's true.

MATT KOHRS: And obviously, the AMC group, which is strongly paired up with, they're a very strong devout group as well. So now if we're emerging those two groups, I could see a little bit of a virality nature to it, for sure.

SEANA SMITH: And I think this time around, it makes a heck of a lot more sense, obviously, from just a business perspective when they did make the changes back in, when was that? 2017, 2018, when they had a $10 per month for unlimited. Clearly, that was not going to work.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah, that's not making-- you're not making money on that.

SEANA SMITH: But this time around, it's a credit system. Those credits fluctuate depending on the time of the day that the movie has shown, how popular the movie is, the list goes on. So this makes a lot more sense. And I do think it is a good idea to win back some of those people who simply are not used to, and are not going to, the movies as much as they were pre-pandemic. With that said, I would not do it.

JOSH SCHAFER: I think it'd interesting to see how it helps food sales, though, at the movies too. If you do get people going more, does that sort of help AMC when you think about what they're able to sell from a food perspective and getting people in that theater more? Because you get the deal on the ticket, but you're still probably buying popcorn every time.

ALEXANDRA CANAL: And I like your theory that the apes, that they're going to be subscribing to MoviePass. That's interesting. I guess we'll have to see. I'm sure the theaters are bullish on this.

SEANA SMITH: And they're die-hards. So I think that that's a pretty safe bet. All right. Matt Kohrs, great to have you here. Josh and Allie, of course, thank you.