Disney+, Hulu Merged App to Launch Next Month, Bob Iger Says
variety.com
Disney+, Hulu Merged App to Launch Next Month, Bob Iger Says::Disney will launch a beta test of an app next month that combines Disney+ and Hulu into a single experience, CEO Bob Iger said.
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I worked at Disney+ until a few months ago (got laid off after 5 years, how nice of them), everything was still segmented internally. Even a year or more after the Hulu merger we still operated essentially as two separate companies. They did their thing and we did ours, practically no communication between the teams.
They should keep it separate. If Disney was smart, they’d split into two companies. The Disney brand that owns family-oriented IP, and a more adult-oriented brand that owns all the other crap. There’s no need for Disney to own ESPN for example.
It all came from the Fox deal when Disney bought everything except Fox News for 71 billion. They needed content for Disney+ that appealed to adults. Hulu has also been rolled out to other countries and is known as Star,why the name change? Zero clue.
That explains a lot. I have been wondering WTF that was.
They may have given us an explanation for it, but I probably ignored it. Possibly something with trademarks and copyrights.
TIL Star = Hulu. I thought it was just their more grownup-oriented channel
TIL.. I thought it was some low budget channel they'd bought the catalogue of
That's a very reasonable point of view, but couldn't they still achieve this by creating some filter that says "family" within the Disney+ app so that they can still isolate toons and family movies and series?
However, it's also true that my experience with all these sites is that content is poorly arranged and searchable, so keeping them separate might have simplified this
They could, they have, and so has literally every other major streaming service.
The rest of us are rightfully pissed off at the balkanization of content forcing us to pay for a hundred different subscriptions and this person is arguing that it must continue, lest easily filterable content exists on the same service 🤦
There were some supremely dumb technical decisions made on the Disney side during that merger
Yup, they thought they were on the top of the world during COVID, and then once people got out of the house and stopped binge watching everything for days on end the revenue started falling and the investors started losing their shit.
So what causes the terrible UIs on these apps? Is it all just in the name of feeling different from the others?
Probably, that and seeing how many ads they can cram in unobtrusively. I didn't work in UX I was a Linux SysAdmin/Eng