Disney CFO Reveals Plans On Merging Hulu & Disney+ Together
Over the past few years, we’ve seen Disney slowly bring together all of its streaming platforms into one single app, Disney+, with the addition of ESPN On Disney+ and Hulu On Disney+. Later this year, Disney will be bringing Hulu into Disney+ in the United States, similar to how it already operates internationally.
This past Monday, Disney’s Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Financial Officer, Hugh Johnston, took part in a question-and-answer session at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, where he spoke about several projects at Disney.
During the Q&A session, Hugh was asked about the upcoming plan to bring Disney+ and Hulu together, specifically how their team plans on executing that in a way that’s not disruptive to the customer and additive to the business, to which he responded:
Yes. In a couple of ways. One, obviously, we’re going to overcommunicate to customers what’s going on with that. That said, our view is we’re going to make it so much of an enhanced experience for our customers that, in fact, they’re going to want to be a part of this new Disney+ app. Now what does that mean? From the inside of the company, we’re going to combine watch histories, combine a lot of the data. That enables us to create much more sharp recommendations in terms of things that you may like or things that you would want to watch. And we’ll do that both with things that people have authenticated themselves for, but other things that they haven’t subscribed for with the hope that we can also market and upsell to them. Our view of it is it will be a much, much friendlier app.
He added:
The homepage will be much more customized for the individual. And over time, we’re hoping that people will sort of — will be able to increase monetization per consumer by virtue of offering them features that they’re interested in and they’re interested in subscribing in as well. Now that said, if you’re really someone who only wants one thing, you just want Disney+, you just want Hulu, you’ll still have the opportunity to do that. But as you might imagine, with price points and with marketing, we’re going to encourage people to bundle and take more and more of the content that’s on Disney+. So we are really, really excited about it, and that’s something that will be on our doorstep at year-end.
Roger’s Take: Over the past two years, we’ve slowly seen Disney ramp up its marketing to highlight how Hulu and Disney+ work together, with the logos of both streaming platforms regularly appearing interchangeably. With many Hulu originals being available on Disney+ and the other way around. This is all part of a long-running plan to get audiences used to a merger, so by the time it happens, most subscribers won’t see much difference.
The next shift in this plan is to bring Hulu into Disney+, but also in a slow method of still letting people subscribe to a bundle or Hulu individually, which personally feels unnecessary and confusing. With the eventual merger of Paramount+ and HBO Max, we will see more consolidation in the streaming world, so a fully operational version of Disney+ with more choice is a stronger competitor to the other platforms.
Ultimately, Hulu will be fully incorporated into Disney+, as it already is everywhere else in the world, but Disney continues to play it softly and tries to use the bundle to make it appear as if there is more value in a combined offering. It does sometimes feel like Disney is moving extremely slowly to the eventual outcome, trying desperately not to lose any subscribers along the way.
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