- Disney+ could merge with the Disney park and cruise apps
- CEO Josh D’Amaro teased it on the company’s latest earnings call
- The goal is to increase engagement with Disney+ subscribers who don’t visit its theme parks
Have you ever wished Disney+ would force you to ads on its theme parks and cruise lines? No? I thought so — but it looks like one of the best streaming services might be getting the overhaul regardless.
Speaking on the entertainment giant’s earnings call on Wednesday (May 6), newly appointed CEO Josh D’Amaro teased a possible merger 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 it has to offer across its divisions. “As we seek to build Disney+ beyond a premium streaming video service, we are focused on making the platform more engaging, more personal and more central to how fans experience our brands,” the company wrote in its earnings call document.
Before the days of Disney+, it was theme parks and theatrical releases where Disney fans would primarily interact with the company’s vast universe of fantasy worlds and characters. But spending habits have changed, a fact acknowledged by D’Amaro, who ran Disney’s parks division before taking over from Bob Iger as CEO earlier this year.
“Disney+ will be the primary relationship between Disney and its fans, the place where everything comes together,” D’Amaro said on the company’s earnings call. However, D’Amaro still believes that theme parks are the beating heart of the brand, though he shared that there are still “millions” of Disney fans who don’t visit them.
Simply put, combining its streaming service with other apps like Disneyland Resort and Disney Cruise Line Navigator would create one big comprehensive hub that reaches millions of people who don’t read about the parks and therefore don’t spend money to visit them. For example, a Disney+ subscriber could be streaming a movie or show and then decide they want to plan a visit to a theme park, and they would have to look no further than the Disney+ app to find resources such as what’s on guides, schedules, and news and announcements to help them put together an itinerary for their trip.
But getting more fans to visit the parks is just part of the plan. D’Amaro believes that combining these apps to increase engagement “may be the most significant opportunity that [we] have” when it comes to preventing churn on Disney+, AKA the number of users who opt out. But is pouring a bunch of, let’s be honest, unrelated apps into a visual entertainment platform the key to achieving those goals?
We’ve seen this movie before with other tech giants. When Elon Musk was preparing to acquire Twitter (now X), he said it was the start of his journey to create an ‘everything app’, which would include services where you could do everyday tasks like the WeChat platform. But look how it went.
In Disney’s case, it’s a more realistic idea given the synergy between its divisions, but whether or not it’s something that Disney+ subscribers and moviegoers have been asking for is a separate debate entirely.
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