ABC

“ABC, though, Ben, as you were saying, they're the newest of the networks, and they're struggling to catch on. They need something like Disney and Disneyland to break out. So they say, yes, Walt's line on this was that ABC needed the show so badly that they bou…”

“ABC ends up investing 500,000 dollars in equity in Disneyland Inc., same terms and amount as Disney Productions. In addition, though, they also guarantee four and a half million dollars in bank loans.”

“In addition to this 500,000 and the 4.5 million, ABC is also going to pay five million dollars per year to Walt Disney Productions to make the show that they're going to put on the air. And it was ABC's to air for seven years, which made it the largest TV prog…”

“ABC negotiated to have the right to all the profits from Disneyland's food and beverage for the first decade.”

“So it quickly becomes the second most popular show on television after I Love Lucy, and it's the first ABC program to crack the top 25 shows Ever. Like, it was all NBC and CBS until Disneyland.”

“We've got this, like, joint venture called Disneyland Inc. It's got 500,000 dollars from Walt Disney Productions. It's got 500,000 dollars from ABC. It's got 200,000 dollars from Western Publishing, who distributed their books. And then Walt himself put in 250…”

“It was the world's largest live telecast ever. Eighty-three million people tuned in to watch from home. Which means that nearly half of America watched this broadcast.”

“In 1960, when the company actually had enough cash to do it, that's when Roy negotiated, hey, we'll pay you seven and a half million dollars to buy out your stake. So by 1960, the publicly traded company, Walt Disney Productions, did own all of Disneyland, Inc…”

“So ABC signs a league-wide five-year TV rights deal with the American Football League for eight and a half million dollars over five years. It was by far, far the single biggest sports rights TV deal in history at the time.”

“And that was before the league had played a single game.”

“ABC gets exclusive rights to Monday Night Football for a new deal, new product, 8.5 million dollars per season.”

“What you want to be paying for is the smallest amount of content possible that gets distributed to the widest audience possible. So you actually should be willing to pay up to twenty million as long as the aggregate number of viewers that you get on that day i…”

“The first Monday Night Football game that airs that season is watched by sixty million U.S. Households.”

“The reason I say it's maybe the greatest product lunch of all time, because it's eight months of one of the highest rated television shows that functions when you watch them as a giant ad for Disneyland”

“ABC would invest a half a million dollars outright in the park. Then they have to purchase a weekly hour-long television program, and for that, think about it, Disney got paid to advertise his park. That's the way you think about it. They're paying him 50,000 …”

“The reason the deadline can't move is because they, it had to come live on July 17th and not a day later because the partnership agreement that he had with ABC was that the parks opening would also be in conjunction with the most ambitious live television broa…”

“So he buys ABC network for nearly 3.5 billion dollars with financing from his friend, Warren Buffett. The ABC deal was the largest non oil and gas transaction in business history to that point.”

“Under Burke's oversight, the staff that oversaw ABC's TV station group dropped from 60 to eight people. The margin gap was closed in just two years. So in two years, they brought ABC's margins from 30% to over 50.”

“It would be 13 years before we faced another 24 hour news channel.”