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
Autentifică-te pentru a adăuga comentarii
Alte posturi din acest grup

It’s been a wild few years for Snowflake, from a record-breaking IPO to a plummeting stock price to a data-breach scandal. Sridhar Ramaswamy took over in the heat of the turmoil and helped s


Why are AI chatbots so intelligent—capable of understanding complex ideas, crafting surprisingly good short stories, and intuitively grasping what users mean? The truth is, we don’t fully know. La

The web is being swamped by AI slop—but th


Think you’ve got game? Time to put it to the test with Tinder’s latest launch in collaboration with OpenAI.
On Tuesday, Tinder rolled out The Game Game—a new experience designed to help

The old Tesla can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh, ‘cause she’s dead.
Over the past few days, a new trend has emerged on TikTok: people are posting their Tesla trade-ins accompani