Disney+ subscribers may have already noticed a new addition to the carousel on the app’s home screen: along with Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic, there’s now a link to access Hulu content. The two apps won’t officially merge until March, but the beta test is now live.
Disney is currently in the process of buying out Comcast’s share in Hulu, a long-teased deal made official earlier this month. Right now, the Disney Bundle Duo Basic with ads, featuring Disney+ and Hulu, is $9.99 a month; if you want ESPN with that, it’s $14.99 a month (and if you don’t want ads, the Disney Bundle Trio Premium is $24.99 a month). According to the Wrap, the price will not change from the bundle price when the apps fully merge.
After the merge, you will still be able to subscribe separately to Disney+ and Hulu if you don’t want one or the other, but the hope is that the “one-app experience” will please churn-prone customers who’d prefer to find all their content on a single landing page. Deadline likens it to the blending of Showtime and Paramount+ earlier this year, a move that has made accessing the two services virtually seamless.
Disney+’s “Hulu Hub” will look different than the existing Hulu home screen, with the trade pointing out “parental controls will be a key element of the one-app experience, given sensitivities around Disney’s well-established brand with kids and families” and the fact that Hulu is more aimed at adults. If you’re an existing subscriber, expect to get a prompt asking you to fine-tune your content settings—and in fact, this beta period’s main purpose is to give parents time to handle that. Deadline quotes Disney CEO Bob Iger, speaking on a November earnings call, as saying: “We are basically putting it in beta so that we can prepare parents, largely, to basically implement parental controls, because you’ll be able to access Hulu programming on the same app.”
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