A lot of speculation is around what Disney’s plans are with Hulu.
One idea is to bring Hulu in as a hub inside Disney+, similar to how Amazon Prime and Hulu already have subscribed add-on channels. This would make Disney+ even more like a streaming TV station with various channels.
Adding a Hulu hub within Disney+, would be away round adding more mature content to Disney+ and ideally increase. subscriptions to Hulu, raising more revenue for Disney. While many including myself would prefer just one streaming service with everything, Disney is still cautious about associating some brands with the Disney name and also Disney+ wouldn’t be able to continue at its current price point with double or treble the amount of content.
Could Hulu Become A Hub Within Disney+ ? | What’s On Disney Plus
Disney also was once going to take Hulu internationally, but it seems those plans have stalled. In part, perhaps they don’t want to make Hulu too valuable, because Comcast still owns a stake and the more valuable it is, the more Disney will need to pay Comcast by 2024 to buyout their stake.
We’ve enjoyed Hulu, it’s one of the better streaming channels. For new content, anyway, if you strip away the main IP that Disney+ has (Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, The Simpsons, Disney animation etc), it’s a better streaming service than Disney+. It seems like Disney+ strategy was to assemble and offer their legacy content and not add much new in the first year. They have season two of The Mandalorian coming and some notable movies, but more new content comes regularly to Hulu. Also, Hulu is more adult-oriented.
So, does it make sense to fold Hulu into Disney+? I’m not sure on this one. It might turn off Hulu subscribers who don’t see Hulu as Disney, then again it might add an edge to Disney+ that it is more than (mostly) family-friendly content. I kind of like the idea of keeping the services separate and standalone, but can see this would make Disney+ more robust, particularly in the adding new content portion of the service, which is a current weakness.
What do you think? Leave Hulu standalone or should it be folded into Disney+?
I’m torn on the issue, too. I would love to see Disney go the way of every other service and bring them all together as a ”house of brands,” all under the Disney+ banner because I feel like the ”bundle” makes it sound like the cable cord most are cutting. Each service serves a different audience, but I would love to see some integration of the 3. Hulu live could resemble peacocks ”channels” tab? The more people expand their subscriptions across services, Disney may want to pare down to just 1. Jedi mind trick people are trying to ”not subscribe to 30 services.”
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Yeah, most people don’t want to have a bunch of different billing situations going online. Somebody should come along and aggregate all streaming into one place. Like a PayPal for streaming or something. This would make it more convenient than the ala carte mode we currently have to deal with.
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