Disney's planning an (optional) app that will smoosh Disney+ and Hulu together

As we’ve noted on more than one occasion, Disney’s ownership of old-school TV streamer Hulu has been a bit of an awkward fit in recent years. After all, it’s not like Disney ever set out to own Hulu: It picked up a majority stake in the project, originally launched as a multi-network attempt to break into a streaming economy totally dominated by Netflix, as various other participants dipped out over the last decade or so. (Sealing majority ownership when it hoovered up Fox a few years back, leaving it with a two-thirds stake of the streamer, and NBC owner Comcast with the other third.) The issue, of course, is that Disney now has its own streaming service, Disney+, with the two operating in semi-competition with each other. (To say nothing of ESPN+, which also operates separately.)

Once-and-current Disney CEO Bob Iger has a fix, though, announcing today that the company will soon be launching an app that smooshes the Hulu and Disney+ blocks of content. Unlike, say, Warner Media’s Max—stitched together from the corpses of Discovery+ and HBO Max—the new app will apparently live in tandem with the existing ones, basically allowing users who subscribe to both services to cut themselves down to a single app and offer “a more unified streaming experience,” according to Iger. (Who managed, unlike successor/predecessor Bob Chapek, not to use any weird organ transplant language while talking about it.) The combo app will supposedly start rolling out by the end of 2023.

There’s a logic to this: While Disney+ has a couple of big brands in the form of Marvel and Star Wars, it also doesn’t do a great job of selling itself for more general content. Hulu’s got tons of that, and has been a consistent money-maker for Disney because of it. Smooshing makes sense.

The juicy stuff here, though, is what it says about Disney’s intentions re: Hulu. There’s a looming deadline hovering over the service’s shared ownership between the two entertainment giants; when January 2024 rolls around, legal language kicks in that allows either side to force Disney to buy out Comcast’s third. Iger has previously projected ambivalence about this—suggesting back in February that Disney might say screw it and just sell the whole thing off itself—but the tighter integration announced today certainly implies Disney will be keeping Hulu around for the foreseeable.

[via THR]