Is Disney Building Toward a Monster Streaming App with Disney+, Hulu and Hulu + Live TV and ESPN?

If Disney’s CEO can stave off a proxy battle from activist investor Nelson Peltz, he has ambitious streaming plans for the company in the next few years. Bob Iger plans to launch the long-anticipated ESPN streaming platform that carries all events offered on the family of linear channels in 2025, and is also at work on a joint venture sports service with Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery that will offer livestreams of 14 channels that’s slated to launch this fall. But the recent introduction of Hulu content onto Disney+ opens the door to the tantalizing possibility that Disney could seek to recreate the cable bundle on its own, offering all of its streaming content in one gargantuan app in the near future.

• Disney took the opportunity to overhaul much of its technical streaming operations when it moved Hulu titles onto Disney+.
• The company said its beta test for Hulu on Disney+ “far exceeded” its expectations.
• Giving customers more types of content and lowering the barriers to access that content could have a marked effect on churn for Disney.

Disney already has a wide range of streaming assets, in addition to the two new sports platforms set to debut in 2024 and 2025. Disney+ is its flagship platform, carrying decades of Disney animation including all of the studio’s most beloved characters, movies and shows from the Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar franchises, and much more. Disney+ also now carries titles from the company’s general entertainment service Hulu.

On the sports side of the equation, Disney operates ESPN+. This service carries tens of thousands of live sports events every year, and while it does not offer the full lineup of games and events that audiences find on the ESPN group of cable channels, it does offer NFL football, daily MLB games, every out-of-market NHL game and just about every college sport there is at differing competition levels. Customers can bundle Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ together to enjoy savings of up to 40%.

The company also owns a live TV streaming service, in the form of Hulu + Live TV. This platform offers around 90 channels, including local affiliates of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in the vast majority of markets. Signing up to Hulu + Live TV at $76.99 per month or higher gets the user free access to Disney’s on-demand streaming services and ESPN+ as well.

Related: Breaking Down Every Disney+ and Hulu Bundle — Which is Right for You? ►

Could Disney Merge All of its Streaming Content onto a Franken-app?

The biggest problem preventing Disney from jamming all of its streaming content into a single, supersized app has been on the technical side. Disney’s streamers all operate using different digital languages, but when the company decided to integrate Hulu and Disney+ more closely, it took the opportunity to make some big behind-the-scenes changes to its streaming tech.

One of the most consequential advancements made by Disney’s team is a “universal metadata translator,” which will allow the company to take streaming content from different sources and present it to the customer the same way. If Disney is planning to launch a unified app that includes on-demand content, live sports, all of the cable channels from Hulu + Live TV and more, it will clearly want a tool like this to make sure customers get a standardized product across the board.

“It could all be one app, and it could also exist outside of one app — the way we’re designing it, it won’t matter,” president of Disney Entertainment Aaron LaBerge said about the new tech updates.

So if we grant the premise that Disney has the ability to merge all of its streaming properties onto a single app, or soon will, it must be determined if the company has the desire to make such a move. Here, too, the company has offered hints.

Disney’s global advertising president Rita Ferro told employees during a company-wide fireside chat in January that the beta test of Hulu content on Disney+ “has far exceeded every metric we had planned for it in the short period of time that we’ve had it.” By that point, Disney+ had only been carrying Hulu titles for around a month, so the company obviously saw some impressive numbers from the integration right away. Disney executives may interpret that data as a sign that a unified streaming app would also drive higher customer engagement with its various services.

Research has proven that the Disney Bundle is already an effective reducer of churn for the company, and it would be foolish for Disney not to at least take a close look at how merging all of its content onto a single app could help raise customer engagement and drive churn down even further.

A single streaming app with all of Disney’s existing and planned content would be essentially a recreation of the cable bundle. Customers would be able to get all the live channels they wanted through Hulu + Live TV, or stick to on-demand only for entertainment using Hulu and Disney+. They could add sports through ESPN if they chose, and ultimately consumers would have a great deal of options and ways to customize their service to get only the most relevant content to them. Disney has a history of offering substantial discounts on bundled services, so the value proposition for subscribers is a pretty good one.

It would be fascinating to see if other media companies tried to stand in the way of Disney combining its streaming properties on one app. Federal regulators could also object; the Department of Justice has pledged to review the JV platform from Disney, Fox and WBD for antitrust violations, and Fubo views the proposed platform as such a threat that it has filed a lawsuit to halt its creation. It could be hard to compete with an all-in-one Disney streaming app that offers so many content choices.

Disney’s latest moves point to at least the possibility that it intends to create a unified streaming app that carries all of its content. Such an app would likely give audiences a great deal of choice and value, and would lower barriers between accessing different types of content that viewers find so frustrating today.