Disney Shutting Down “BabyTV” Streaming Service
Ever since the Walt Disney Company’s new CEO, Josh D’Amaro, unveiled his plans to make Disney+ the company’s ‘Immersive, Interactive Digital Centrepiece ‘, we’ve seen Disney slowly making moves to focus everyone’s attention on that one platform. They’ve been introducing vertical videos, podcasts, live shows, and sports via ESPN, plus Hulu is set to be merged into Disney+ in the US later this year, as it is internationally.
As such, it’s recently been revealed that Disney is going to be closing down its “BabyTV” streaming service at the end of August.
Subscribers can continue to use the app until August 31st 2026, or until their existing subscription ends.
The streaming service is home to many shows including “Walter & Dude”, “Giggle Wiggle”, “Olly”, “Cuddlies”, and “Mowgli: Welcome To The Jungle”.
Over the years, since its acquisition of 20th Century Fox, we’ve seen Disney slowly pulling back on the Baby TV brand, closing its linear channels in many countries around the world, including Japan, Brazil, France and most recently, Canada.
Even the BabyTV website now redirects to a generic Disney page promoting YouTube and Disney+.
One reason for this might be that while BabyTV is distributed globally by the Walt Disney Company, an Israeli company, Talit Communications, is actually the owner of the company, though apparently the headquarters is in London, England.
Roger’s Take: It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to see Disney closing down BabyTV, since there is a cost to operating this streaming service and creating/licensing content. However, it doesn’t feel like the users are especially being pushed or promoted over to Disney+; instead, it’s just coming to a natural end. Unfortunately for BabyTV, once it was acquired by Disney, it’s generally been ignored, as the Disney Jr brand is considered much more important to Disney.
We’ve seen some of the BabyTV shows made available on Disney+, but the majority of them haven’t yet made the leap over, so hopefully that will happen in the future once the app is closed down, but it feels like the YouTube channel is the main focus now, which also makes sense since so much viewership is on that app now anyway.
What do you think of the BabyTV streaming service closing down? Let me know on social media!
