The Disney Plus-Hulu merger is way more than a streaming bundle

So, yes, Hulu is just a tile. But that tile also seems to represent something bigger inside of Disney: the full Disney Plus-ification of everything, as the tech and strategy it built over the last few years percolates out to everything else Disney does. “We zoomed out and took a very long-term approach,” says Aaron LaBerge, the president and CTO of... See more

When I ask LaBerge if this feels like an inflection point, the moment Disney Plus really took over Disney, he says yes. But not in the way I’m thinking. The future isn’t necessarily one behemoth app for everything, he says. “It could all be one app, and it could also exist outside of one app — the way we’re designing it, it won’t matter.” You and I... See more

That improved metadata makes things like search better — and also improves personalization. By unifying everything in the background, Disney now plans to use all the company’s data about you to recommend stuff you might like. What you watch on Hulu will affect your Disney Plus recommendations and vice versa; so will the rides you go on at Disney Wo... See more

So Disney had to re-encode all the Hulu video files to work on Disney Plus, which it could have done in a relatively straightforward way, but instead, the company decided to use this opportunity to roll out a single content library system for everything, everywhere.

Over time, the goal is to make all of Disney’s streaming services, and maybe even all of Disney, work out of this single system. That means making the tools work in many languages, across many regions, and with many partners. It’ll take a while, and ultimately, it will affect much more than just Disney Plus, too. It’ll change the way the entire com... See more

The same goes for the metadata, the information about each title. Streaming metadata is a mess; every studio, producer, and platform seems to have a different language with which to talk about content. Disney has been building something like a universal metadata translator, says Jay Donnell, the company’s SVP of product engineering. “We don’t assum... See more

But “it’s just Hulu inside of Disney Plus” turns out to be a bigger deal — and a bigger undertaking — than it sounds. As it has prepared to integrate Hulu, Disney has also been changing the way the whole company thinks about streaming. It has worked to better integrate everything from login tools to advertising platforms to metadata and personaliza... See more

Here’s just one example of what that looks like: Chris Lawson, the EVP of content operations at the company, estimates that Disney had to move more than 100,000 individual assets from Hulu to Disney Plus in order to make this work. “It’s a mixture of content that we own and content from our partners,” he says. Every partner shares that content in d... See more

They’re artwork designed to be used in various places in the app, in email marketing blasts, on Hollywood billboards, and elsewhere. Disney Plus, a huge global service, requires content providers to include lots of this stuff alongside every title, up to twice as much as Hulu requires. So part of the process for Disney has been to adapt all that Hu... See more