Disney. Pixar. Marvel. Star Wars. National Geographic. Hulu. The Walt Disney Co. isn’t a portfolio of brands so much as a portfolio of portfolios of brands. Today it’s expanding its Disney+ streaming service by adding content from yet another of its marquee names: ESPN.
More specifically, it’s adding a tile to the Disney+ home screen that leads to content from the ESPN+ streaming service, which is available both in stand-alone form and as part of a variety of bundles. Disney+ viewers who also pay for ESPN+ will get a lot of it, including 30,000 live sporting events a year—NBA, WNBA, college basketball, MLB, NHL, the Australian Open, and beyond—as well as 6,000 hours of on-demand programming. Those who just subscribe to Disney+ will still be able to watch a more limited selection of ESPN+ material, including five NBA games and an animated special called Dunk the Halls on Christmas Day.
The ESPN+ integration comes a year after Disney started letting Hulu subscribers watch most of that service’s shows and movies inside Disney+, a major technical undertaking I wrote about at the time. Now the company is adding some Hulu items to Disney+ at no additional charge, including series such as Reservoir Dogs and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and other movies.
The new ESPN+ presence and expanded Hulu one will help round out the traditionally family-centric Disney+ as it competes against generalist rivals such as Netflix, HBO Max, and Amazon Prime Video. Disney is also up front about them being a marketing tool that might get folks who currently pay only for Disney+ to splurge on a bundle.
ESPN on Disney+ is the latest development in the sports cable network’s slow-roll embrace of streaming, which began back in 2018 with the introduction of ESPN+—not an Internet-based version of ESPN in its classic form, but a separate, self-contained lineup of programming. Disney says that full-blown ESPN will finally be available as a streaming service early in the fall of 2025.
Another planned ESPN online offering—Venu Sports, a mega-bundle with material from Disney, Fox, and Warner Discovery—is presently in limbo after a federal judge granted sports streamer Fubo’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the joint venture on antitrust grounds
Jelentkezéshez jelentkezzen be
EGYÉB POSTS Ebben a csoportban
Social media users have been having a field day with Waymo’s autonomou
If you’re not on TikTok, you may not have heard of Aaron Parnas. But for many young people across the U.S., he’s a prominent political news source, with over 3.5 million followers on TikTok and ju
Getting a sense of the scale of social media platforms can be tricky. While tech companies often share self-serving metrics—like monthly active users or how likely users are to buy products after
Fun fact: The saying “work smarter, not harder” is coming up on its 100th birthday. Coined
If you’ve followed Apple for any length of time, you’ve no doubt come across the notion that the company doesn’t rush into adopting cutting-
Every now and then, you run into a tool that truly wows you.
It’s rare—especially nowadays, when everyone and their cousin is coming out with overhyped AI-centric codswallop tha
