Disney Update: Wall-E Trailer

Bob Iger spoke yesterday about a range of topics, including Disney's purchase of Pixar in January 2006... that $7.2 billion purchase.

"No, we didn't overpay," he said, in response to a question. "It was clearly fully priced," he added, jokingly. "Maybe that's a euphemism.

Can we all agree that buying Pixar for the innovation-less Disney was completely, totally, unambiguously worth it?  It put Steve Jobs on their board, made gabillions in merchandising from Cars alone, (he even announced rolling out a MMO video game environment based on the Cars universe), and the stock is up 9 points since he took over. 

Oh, and Pixar happens to make incredible movies.  Not only do they have a deal for Toy Story 3, but here's the newest Wall-E trailer.  Can't wait.

He also discussed something else that caught a few eyes around the industry.

Iger said that since hooking up with Apple's iTunes a year and a half ago, consumers have downloaded 40 million-50 million episodes of Disney-generated TV shows and 4 million movies.

Now, most journalists just say, "whoa... those are big numbers," and leave it at that.  I like to call that lazy journalism.  Silicon Alley Insider, however, decided to do some homework... and I quote:

• Pali Research's Rich Greenfield estimates that Disney (DIS) is getting about $14.50 for each movie sold through Apple (AAPL). 4 million x $14.50 = $58 million.
• We estimate that Disney gets about $1.44 for each video it sells. 45 million x $1.44 = $64.8 million
• Grand total: $122.8 million: In other words, a little less than 10% of the $1 billion digital revenue goal Iger has laid out for his company this year -- and a rounding error for a company that generated $35 billion in sales last year.

Now... $123 million is truly nothing for a company of Disney's size, but it is all incremental revenue, as SAI reports.  The net is that digital sales of TV and movies aren't going to be moneymakers anytime soon.  I am curious though... how much does a Comcast make from VOD sales?  Is it dramatically more than this... or generally on par?