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
