- Disney+ could be merging with Disney park and cruise apps
- CEO Josh D'Amaro teased it at the company's latest earnings call
- The aim is to boost engagement with Disney+ subscribers who don't visit its theme parks
Ever wanted Disney+ to force-feed you ads on its theme parks and cruise lines? No? I thought so — but it seems that one of the best streaming services could be getting the overhaul regardless.
Speaking at the entertainment giant’s earnings call on Wednesday (May 6), newly-appointed CEO Josh D’Amaro teased a possible merging of the Disneyland Resort and Disney Cruise Line Navigator apps with the company’s flagship streaming service, which was first reported by Bloomberg ($/£). But why?
In short, D’Amaro wants to upgrade the Disney+ user experience to encompass not just one or two areas of the brand, but everything that it has to offer across its divisions. “As we look to build Disney+ beyond a premium streaming video service, we are focused on making the platform more engaging, more personalized, and more central to how fans experience our brands,” the company states in its earnings call document.
Prior to the days of Disney+, it was theme parks and theatrical movie releases where Disney fans would primarily interact with the company’s extensive universe of fantasy worlds and characters. But consumption habits have changed, and D’Amaro, who ran the Disney parks division before taking over Bob Iger as CEO earlier this year, has acknowledged this.
“Disney+ becomes the primary relationship between Disney and its fans, the place where everything comes together,” D’Amaro said at the company’s earnings call. However, D’Amaro still believes that theme parks are the beating heart of the brand, even though he shared that there are still “millions” of Disney fans who don’t visit them.
To put it simply, combining its streaming service with other apps like Disneyland Resort and Disney Cruise Line Navigator would create one big comprehensive hub reaching millions of people who aren’t reading about the parks, and who are therefore not spending money to visit them. For example, a Disney+ subscriber could stream a movie or show and then decide they want to plan a visit to a theme park, and they wouldn’t have to look anywhere else other than the Disney+ app to find resources such as what’s on guides, timetables, and news and announcements to help them piece together an itinerary for their trip.
But getting more fans to visit the parks is just one part of the plan. D’Amaro believes that combining these apps to boost engagement “might be the single most significant opportunity that [we] have” when it comes to preventing churn on Disney+, AKA, the number of users who are unsubscribing. But is pouring a shedload of, let’s be honest, unrelated apps into a visual entertainment platform the key to achieving these goals?
We’ve seen this film before with other tech giants. Back when Elon Musk was gearing up to acquire Twitter (now X), he said it was the start of his journey to create an ‘everything app’, which would encompass services where you could conduct everyday tasks like the WeChat platform. But look at how that turned out.
In Disney’s case, it’s a more realistic idea given the synergy of its divisions, but whether or not it’s something that Disney+ subscribers and movie buffs have asked for is a completely separate debate.
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