Despite the pandemic, Disney (DIS -0.41%) had a strong last quarter on several business fronts. In this segment of "The Earnings Show" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on Feb. 11, Fool contributor Danny Vena looks at two factors that the media giant hopes will lead to continued growth over the next year.
Danny Vena: The highlights, media revenue which is from movies, particularly in theaters that was up 15% year-over-year. Parks revenue more than doubled. That was a big contributor to the revenue beat. I think one of the things that they are watching is whether or not there's going to be another variant that comes out that could potentially keep people from crossing through the turnstiles on a regular basis. So far because omicron has turned out to be less severe, they've seen an uptick in park attendance which is really good news for investors.
DTC which is direct-to-consumer and that is all of their streaming services. Revenue from that grew 34% year-over-year. Disney Plus had a total of just under 130 million Disney Plus subscribers to close out the quarter. Now there were a couple of things here that I'm not sure they're exactly concerns but there are certainly things to watch.
First, is that park traffic is still below pre-pandemic levels back in 2019 so still a little bit lower attendance. The good news is that Disney has pricing power and has always had pricing power. I read a headline that I didn't get much clarity on having read the article. But there was a news report that says Disney has plans for a major price increase within it parks in 2023. We'll have to see whether or not that comes about or not.
The second thing is whether or not Disney's direct-to-consumer business or subscriber growth is tied to the omicron variant. There was California, where I live, had an increase in pandemic-related restrictions, mass restrictions that may have contributed to fewer people in the parks but that may also have created an uptick in Disney's subscriber levels. We'll have to see whether or not that's the case.
Now one thing that I did want to point out here is that there were an additional two million subscribers that were added to Disney Plus, which was kind of an accounting trick and I want to explain that. Disney made the strategic decision to include the Disney bundle and that's Disney Plus, ESPN Plus, and Hulu in the cost of a Hulu Live subscription.
If customers get Hulu Live then what happens this is along with Hulu Live they get this included. Disney said during the conference call that they had about a four million increase in Disney Plus subscribers domestically. A good number of those, two million of the four million was a result of they said our strategic decision to include Disney Plus and ESPN Plus as part of Hulu Live subscription. That's about half of the domestic customer adds.
I pointed that out because you can only do that once. That was a way to boost their subscriber growth. It came at a good time, it gives the market a little bit of confidence in what Disney was doing. But certainly worth watching because they're not going to be able to get that artificial subscriber bump again.