Breaking: Disney to Launch Beta Version of Combined Disney+, Hulu Next Month; Full Version in Spring 2024

It was only a matter of time. In May, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that the company would be bringing together its entertainment streaming services Disney+ and Hulu into a one-app experience before the end of the 2024 calendar year. While full details were not disclosed at the time, the assumption was that it would involve either a tile on each service housing some of the biggest titles from the corresponding platform, or the ability to easily switch between the services, without having to exit the streaming experience — or potentially some combination of the two.

Then, Disney announced last week that it had begun the process of purchasing the remaining third of Hulu from Comcast for a minimum cost of $8.61 billion. Then on Wednesday, during the conference call following the release of Disney’s 2023 fiscal earnings report, Iger announced that the one-app experience would launch a beta test next month — and will be known as “Hulu on Disney+” — ahead of a full launch in March 2024.

“We expect Hulu on Disney+ will result in increased engagement, greater advertising opportunities, lower churn, and reduced customer acquisition costs, thereby increasing our overall margins,” Iger said. “We will launch a beta version for bundle subscribers in December, giving parents time to set up profiles and parental controls that work best for their families ahead of the official launch in early spring 2024.”

How Will Hulu on Disney+ Work?

On the earnings call, Iger declined to get into details about how the new quasi-merged platform would work, judging by the name “Hulu on Disney+,” it sounds like it will be in line with a report from last week that indicated that Disney+ would add a Hulu tile to its menus, similar to the content collections for Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, National Geographic, and other Disney properties.

What titles will be available via that tile has yet to be confirmed, but it is believed that it will be the most popular Hulu original series and films with some of the next-day episodes from Disney-owned channels as well as those licensed from Fox. Since the beta test is launching specifically for current bundle subscribers, Disney+ customers will not gain access to any new content, so this is instead being positioned as a way to eliminate pain points for subscribers.

In the past, Iger has mentioned that there was unnecessary friction for viewers who want to move between the two sibling platforms without having to exit each individual service. Hulu on Disney+ should allow bundle consumers to bounce back and forth between Disney+ and Hulu content without having to switch between apps.

Once the purchase of Hulu’s remaining 33% is complete, it is inevitable that the two services will be more completely merged, putting both platforms’ libraries on a single service. This mirrors how Paramount Global bundled and then merged SHOWTIME and Paramount+. Initially, the company offered a bundle between the two separate services, then an in-app bundle, and finally this summer they merged into “Paramount+ with SHOWTIME.”

Warner Bros. Discovery did something similar when it turned HBO Max into Max by adding a majority of the content of discovery+. However, the difference between how Paramount and WBD moved forward with these mergers is that Paramount has eliminated the ability for customers to subscribe to SHOWTIME's standalone service while WBD allowed customers who are not interested in the Max offerings to subscribe to the cheaper discovery+ on its own.

It is unlikely that Disney would allow for a separate version of Hulu to remain as a standalone platform due to its long history of ad-supported streaming as the entire industry moves towards this kind of dual subscription and ad-supported model.