Disney+, Hulu and Netflix Make Massive Deal for Grey’s Anatomy and Other Popular Series

Despite insistence from top Disney brass suggesting otherwise, the Mouse is licensing the shows it owns to other streamers. Monday, it was revealed Disney will be giving Netflix a streaming window to cover a dozen Disney-owned television shows for the next year and a half. Included on the list of shows that will be available to stream on Netflix include Lost, Archer, How I Met Your Mother, This Is Us, Home Improvement, and others.

In addition to being available on Netflix, the 14 properties will also be available to stream on the new combo Disney+/Hulu streaming bundle. The full list heading to Netflix includes Lost, This Is Us, Prison Break, Archer, How I Met Your Mother, White Collar, Home Improvement, The Resident, ESPN 30 for 30, My Wife and Kids, Reba, The Bernie Mac Show, and the Wonder Years reboot.

Disney chief Bob Iger previously said the company was going to avoid licensing “core” properties, suggesting those listed above don’t rank highly with the Mouse’s C-suite.

“We’ve actually been licensing content to Netflix and are going to continue to. We’re actually in discussion with them now about some opportunities, but I wouldn’t expect that we will license our core brands to them,” Iger said earlier this year. “Those are obviously competitive advantages for us and differentiators. Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars for instance, they are all doing very, very well on our platform and I don’t see why just to basically chase bucks we should do that when they are really really important building blocks to the current and future of our streaming business.”

At one point, it was reported Disney was losing upwards of $1 billion by not licensing its shows and films to other streamers.

“Another standout this quarter were streaming services,” then-CEO Bob Chapek said at the time. “We ended q2 With more than 205 million total subscriptions after adding 9.2 million in the quarter. That includes 7.9 million Disney plus subscribers, keeping us on track to reach 230 to 260 million Disney plus subscribers by fiscal 24. The growth of the platform since its launch reinforces its unique nature. Quite simply, we believe Disney plus is one of a kind… with general entertainment titles designed to drive signups amongst specific audiences and deepen engagement amongst those cohorts. A benefit of our incredible creative engines and decades of general entertainment excellence is that we can reach these demographics not only through the creation of original titles, but also by shifting resources from across our content ecosystem, especially as consumer behavior continues to evolve.”