Combined Disney+ and Hulu App Will Launch in March 2024

The streaming world got a major update earlier this month, when it was announced that Disney is making strides to fully own Hulu. The company is buying the remaining stake in the streaming service from Comcast, and there’s been a lot of scuttlebutt about what the plans for Hulu look like. Disney has already announced plans to partner up Hulu with their existing Disney+ streaming service in a single app — and now we know the timeline of when that could happen. According to Disney CEO Bob Iger, the combined Disney+ and Hulu option will be released in a beta form in December of 2023, before it will be available to the general public in late March of 2024.

“Speaking of Hulu, we were pleased to announce last week that we will acquire the remaining stake in Hulu held by Comcast, which will further Disney streaming objective,” Iger explained during Disney’s quarterly earnings call on Wednesday. “We remain on track to roll out more unified one app experience domestically, making expensive general entertainment content available to bundle subscribers via Disney+….We expect that Hulu and Disney plus will result in increased engagement, greater advertising opportunities, lower churn and reduced customer acquisition costs, thereby increasing our overall margins. We will launch a beta version for bundle subscribers in December, giving parents time to set up profiles and parental controls that work best for their families ahead of the official launch in early spring 2024.”

“In December, we launch a beta version of Hulu and Disney plus combined. We feel really good about that. I saw some basically some demos of that just yesterday. As a matter of fact, 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. And then in late March, we’ll launch it basically in full form and think we have opportunities in terms of upsell capabilities. In terms of increasing engagement. We found that where we bundled we lower churn, and again, these are steps that are all taken to ultimately turn this into a great business.”

Will Disney Sell Its Networks?

Earlier this year, Iger also indicated that although the company does not hope to sell its stake in ESPN or Hulu, it might be open to making sales for some of its linear cable networks, such as ABC, FX, and Freeform.

“We’re going to be open minded there too, not necessarily about spinning ESPN off, but about looking for strategic partners that can either help us with distribution or content,” Iger said. “But we want to stay in the sports business. Sports is very, very attractive media and we have a unique position and we feel that we should stay in it.”

“Over time when I came back, I was open minded about Hulu because there is this agreement with Comcast that actually calls for a transaction, their stake to us, sometime in 2024 and I didn’t want that to be an automatic. I wanted to look at that objectively,” Iger explained. “I spent a lot of time looking at that as part of the future of our streaming business and ultimately concluded that we would be better off having Hulu than not having Hulu.” 

What do you think of Disney’s new plans for a Disney+ and Hulu combo? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!