Disney has a streaming problem it wants to solve. Aside from its main streaming service, Disney+, the company also has Hulu, which it got as part of the company’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox. That streaming service is also partly owned by Comcast, but the company struck a deal to buy Comcast’s stake in Hulu and make it fully Disney-owned—thus allowing it to merge into Disney+. Now, Hulu content is showing up on Disney+ for some people, eliminating the need to have two apps.
Disney+ in the US is gaining a new Hulu hub where you can access content that’s hosted on Hulu. It appears that basically everything that can be watched on Hulu is available there, including licensed third-party content from networks such as A&E and Adult Swim. Disney CEO Bob Iger said that a merged Disney+/Hulu app would be rolling out in a testing stage this month, and while this is not exactly a “new app,” this appears to be the solution Disney will be going with, at least for now.
Given that a lot of this content is already available on Disney+ in other countries, it probably didn’t require much effort on Disney’s part. There is one caveat, however, and it’s that, if you want to get access to this content on Disney+, you still need to pay for both services or for the bundle that includes both. So, this isn’t really a free add-on to Disney+ users, but rather, a solution so that users of both platforms can check out all their content from one single app.
It’s not clear whether this will remain the case in the long term—Disney might choose to eliminate Hulu entirely after this merger is completely done, instead choosing to make Disney+ more expensive or perhaps adding a more expensive tier with the content that’s supposed to go on Hulu. In some regions, Disney+ has a content hub named Star with this content, while in Latin America, the company maintains a separate streaming service called Star+, so there isn’t a precedent saying how Disney might handle things here. We’ll have to wait and see.
Source: Disney
