They admitted they will lose money for the first few years, not forever. Like almost every single product. Do you think the iPhone or Xbox made a profit in the first few years, when you count the money spent on research and factories?

Disney has lots of ways to monetize. A slight increase in the odds your family books a Disney Cruise is a significant real monetization channel that doesn't show up in subscription pricing. Matthew Ball has a good analysis of these models[0].

[0]https://redef.com/original/nine-reasons-why-disney-will-succ...

How do you lose money on content you already own? This is just Hollywood accounting in effect.

Disney is currently making bank by licensing their catalogue to various streaming/cable services. This stream of revenue will dry up as they take back their IP. It might take them a long time to have enough users on Disney+ to cover the lost licensing revenue.

Netflix has ~150M paying subscriptions. Let's say that $0.20 of your Netflix subscription go to Disney (you can adjust it to whatever you think it might be). That's 30M a month. At $10/m, Disney+ would need 3 million users just to break even with what they used to make from Netflix.

How many active users (or what price point) will Disney need to justify the investment?

https://redef.com/original/nine-reasons-why-disney-will-succ... Towards the end of the article it talks about the challenges they will face.

There's a cost to providing the service in terms terms of bandwidth, servers, and development staff.

There's also a cost to the new, original content they're putting on there, like the Mandalorian.