- Disney+ could merge with Disney parks and cruises apps
- CEO Josh D’Amaro teased this on the company’s latest earnings call.
- The goal is to drive engagement with Disney+ subscribers who don’t visit its theme parks.
Have you ever wanted Disney+ to force you to run ads across its theme parks and cruise lines? No? I thought so, but it looks like one of the best streaming services could use an overhaul anyway.
Speaking on the entertainment giant’s earnings conference 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 improve 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 look to build Disney+ beyond a premium video streaming 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 presentation document.
Before the days of Disney+, it was theme parks and theatrical movie releases where Disney fans primarily interacted with the company’s sprawling universe of fantasy worlds and characters. But consumer habits have changed, and D’Amaro, who ran Disney’s parks division before taking over as CEO from Bob Iger earlier this year, has acknowledged as much.
“Disney+ becomes the primary relationship between Disney and its fans, the place where everything comes together,” D’Amaro said on the company’s earnings conference call. However, D’Amaro still believes that theme parks are the beating heart of the brand, although 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 a large one-stop shop that would reach 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 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 other than the Disney+ app to find resources like guides, schedules, news, and announcements to help them create an itinerary for their trip.
But getting more fans to visit the parks is only part of the plan. D’Amaro believes that combining these applications to drive engagement “could be the most important opportunity we [we] “have” when it comes to avoiding churn on Disney+, aka the number of users who unsubscribe. But is dumping a bunch of, let’s be honest, unrelated apps onto a visual entertainment platform the key to achieving these goals?
We’ve seen this movie before with other tech giants. When Elon Musk was preparing to acquire Twitter (now But look 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 Disney+ subscribers and moviegoers have been asking for is an entirely separate debate.
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