A big deal: Disney figures out the internet

Have you heard of “The Mandalorian”?

If not, you most certainly will, given that the Walt Disney Co. signed up an impressive 10 million subscribers for the streaming video service it rolled out this week.

“The Mandalorian” — a bounty-hunting, capeheavy spinoff of the “Star Wars” franchise — is the flagship of the many original series that the company has stuffed into the new Disney Plus, its attempt to break into the crowded streaming space that for years has been dominated by Netflix.

“Now is the winter of our Disney content,” someone tweeted perfectly.

But, while the praise is deserved, Disney has been trying for 25 years to tame the online medium, and most of its efforts have fallen flat.

The surging successes of many digital companies had not been shared by Disney, as it spent huge amounts of time, effort and, of course, money with little result while new companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon became multibillion-dollar behemoths.

They weren’t alone. It was a path shared by many legacy-media giants. For example, News Corp.’s internet graveyard includes MySpace, The Daily, Delphi Internet Service and Iguide, all of which resulted in not much.

But Disney continued plugging along — over all the others. This digital transformation has been a Disney dream from the moment it formed the

Disney Online unit in the summer of 1995 under the guidance of another executive, Jake Winebaum.

Along the way, there were layoffs, lots of them, even as the company kept at it, spending enough to make Scrooge McDuck scream, as well as placing lots of investment bets. They included $400 million in Vice Media, which Disney wrote down this year to nothing, and a 2014 purchase of YouTube-focused Maker Studios for $675 million.

And yet Disney’s current CEO, Bob Iger, persisted. I’ve always admired his attitude compared to the other legacy-media moguls who were openly disdainful of the internet for far too long.

“I have tried to keep two obvious philosophies,” he said to me in 2010. “First, that our current business not get in the way of adopting new technologies, and, second, that our business belongs on these new platforms.” And a year later in another interview, he noted: “I’m not in the camp that believes that Netflix is going to take over the world. Technology makes it impossible to have a monopoly.”

And now that same belief is what remains, and it’s the driver of Disney Plus, at about $7 a month a streaming service intended to undercut Netflix with its $13 price tag. It includes originals from Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm (a.k.a. Star Wars), National Geographic and all of the shows it acquired in buying Fox Studios (“The Simpsons,” of course), as well as the trove of Disney classics. It is also including its more adult-themed

Hulu and sports ESPN Plus streaming services in a $12 bundle. There are discounts and partnership deals to try to muscle Disney into a market that also includes Apple, Amazon and soon a larger AT&T WarnerMedia effort (there is already HBO Go).

It’s all pretty fantastic, which is why this is finally perhaps the moment Disney gets to gorge, as it concentrates on exploiting its content and stops chasing other tech dreams.

But make no mistake, it’s turned out to be a pricey lunch. The budget for “The Mandalorian” is reportedly $15 million an episode, for example.

That said, that single first show saw two million streams on its first day. Kerpoof ? Hardly.