One App to Stream Them All: Disney+ Begins Full Integration of Hulu and ESPN
With The Walt Disney Company moving towards making Disney+ its one-and-only streaming platform, the app has received a substantial update on Apple TV, with additional devices expected to roll out soon. The new interface is designed to simplify the experience for Disney Bundle subscribers, which previously pushed content from Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN Unlimited into the home page. With the new design, this still occurs under the “For You” page, the default landing page for the platform, which also tailors the content presented to your viewing trends.
As users scroll down the For You page, they will find a new menu bar that calls out recommended content from Disney’s brands. This includes the original tiles, plus FX and ABC News.
Clicking any of the first five options expands their tile, the same as if you clicked at the top of the page. FX and ABC News direct you to their brand pages within the Hulu portion of the app. ESPN Originals, however, appears to be a brand-new page on the service, a convenient shortcut to ESPN’s streaming exclusives.
Navigating within the three separate services, Disney+ still operates like before, with a few changes. Brand tiles have been reduced back to the original five — Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic. While some content from Hulu and ESPN remains available within the Disney+ subscription, it’s now clearer what is included with a Disney+ subscription and what comes from other services within the Disney Bundle.
The Hulu section of the app appears identical to the landing page of the previous Hulu brand tile within Disney+. As Disney prepares to shut down the separate Hulu app, some fan-favorite aspects of the Hulu app are still missing within the Disney+ app. This even extends to some content, like ABC’s General Hospital, which consistently ranks within Hulu’s “Top 15 Today” menu (another feature absent within Disney+), and isn’t available on Disney+, likely because Hulu only maintains the most recent ten episodes of the show at any given time. The apps also don’t handle anime the same way, and Disney seems to still be figuring out how to handle the Hulu+ Live TV service, which is merging with Fubo and could become a separate app if Disney+ can’t find a way to integrate the service.
The ESPN section of the Disney+ app offers a much closer approximation of the separate experience of the ESPN app, but one of its most-loved features, the ability to multiview live events, has yet to be integrated into the new Disney+ interface. ESPN Bet integration is also, for now, exclusive to the separate ESPN app.
Along with the rollout of the new Disney+ interface, the streamer released a promotional video on YouTube about it. The video highlights the segregation of the Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN experiences within the Disney+ app, celebrating the win of making it easier for subscribers to find the content they want to watch.
The video also plugs the ability to safeguard kids with profile customization. There doesn’t appear to be any significant changes to this functionality, which has always provided parents with numerous options, including passcode locking of parent profiles so kids can’t access them independently. You can still set up “Junior Mode” accounts for the youngest members of your family. Within regular profiles, content can be blocked based on rating, including filtering out programs without a rating.
Overall, today’s update to the Disney+ app feels like a small step towards merging Disney’s three streaming services into one platform. There’s still a lot of work to be done to satisfy subscribers of the Disney Bundle, many of whom have found reasons to want to stay within the separate apps. From multiviewing live sports to watching content that Disney+ hasn’t added for whatever reason, if Disney wants users to prematurely trim down to one app, Disney+ isn’t there yet.