Technical Details Reveal Challenges of Integrating Hulu into Disney+; Is Disney Prepping to Merge All Streaming Apps?

The beta is over, and Hulu on Disney+ — Disney’s first try at a “one-app experience” — is officially live. Disney+ has even changed its color to reflect the new content available within its tile rows, and from an audience perspective, the changeover has been fairly straightforward. But Disney streaming officials spoke with The Verge this week to lay out exactly what kind of technical advancements had to be made to allow Hulu on Disney+ to come into being.

• Hundreds of thousands of digital assets had to be transferred from Hulu to Disney+ individually to make the merged experience a reality.
• Disney took the opportunity to create a unified content library system that it can use for all streamers going forward.
• A single, all-encompassing Disney streaming app is possible in the future, and advancements made to bring Hulu to Disney+ could help.

As comments from Disney representatives make clear that the introduction of Hulu shows and movies on Disney+ was far more than a simple drag-and-drop operation for the company’s engineers. Disney EVP of content operations Chris Lawson told The Verge that more than 100,000 individual assets had to be moved from Hulu to Disney+, including digital artwork meant to be used on content pages and more. Much of this content has been licensed from other studios and had to be translated from various digital languages to work inside Disney+, which operates on a different tech stack.

Each video file from Hulu had to be re-encoded to stream on Disney+. The company decided to turn that tedious-sounding task into an opportunity for overhauling its entire content library system, allowing Disney to create a platform that it can use for all current streaming operations and to build upon in the future.

“That in and of itself has been a bit of a massive lift,” said president of Disney Entertainment Aaron LaBerge. “But when it’s all said and done, we will have one master media library for the entire company that has the same consistent metadata formats, description of content, and playback encoding, that is the highest quality it can be for the entire Walt Disney Company.”

The rollout of Hulu titles on Disney+ also required some serious revisions to metadata, the information about each title contained in its files. Disney has been attempting to create something of a “universal metadata translator,” which will allow it to take content from various sources and present it the same way to streaming customers. While this might seem like a very behind-the-scenes development, these metadata improvements can have a dramatic impact on how we watch shows and movies. Metadata is the driving force that makes searches more effective and enhances content curation and personalization.

Going forward, the titles that customers watch on Hulu can affect the recommendations they’ll see on Disney+. The company wants the titles you watch on its streaming platforms to connect with what you view on linear channels like ESPN, in order to make your watching experience as personalized as possible. Officials stopped short of promising that you’ll eventually be able to see your watch histories across platforms, but Disney seems to be working toward that feature.

Is Disney Moving Toward a Single, Unified Streaming App?

When Disney first announced that it would bring Disney+ and Hulu together as a one-app experience in 2023, the question immediately arose as to what would happen with the standalone Hulu app. There are no plans to shutter the app right away, but the new technical improvements made by Disney streaming engineers could make it easier for the company to combine all its digital assets into one app in the future.

“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,” LaBege told The Verge.

In the future, Disney could use this technology to essentially replicate the cable bundle. Its ESPN streaming service featuring the full content slate of the ESPN channel group is currently scheduled to launch in 2025; if Disney can make that content available in the same app alongside entertainment options from Disney+ and Hulu. Fans can already watch sports content in the Disney Bundle through ESPN+, but this platform does not carry all sports available on the company’s cable channels, and it requires viewers to navigate to a new app to use.

The “universal metadata translator” could help Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery in their attempts to create a joint venture streaming platform that carries content from all three companies. That service will be a live TV streaming platform instead of on-demand, but at the very least it’s clear that Disney is thinking of ways to make its tech work better alongside content from other providers.

For viewers, the launch of Hulu on Disney+ has been incredibly simple,. That was the ideal outcome for Disney, but the work its technicians had to do to ensure the move was a successful one was incredibly complex. Disney used the opportunity not only to improve its streaming platforms for the present but also to make advancements it can benefit from in the future.

“We zoomed out and took a very long-term approach,” LaBerge said. “We’re going to be running a streaming service forever.”