- Disney+ could merge with Disney parks and cruise apps
- CEO Josh D’Amaro teased this during the company’s latest earnings call.
- The goal is to increase engagement among Disney+ subscribers who do not visit its theme parks.
Ever wanted Disney+ to force-feed you ads about 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 during the entertainment giant’s earnings conference call Wednesday (May 6), new CEO Josh D’Amaro discussed 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 said in its earnings call document.
Before the days of Disney+, it was through theme parks and theatrical movie releases that Disney fans primarily interacted with the company’s vast universe of fantastical worlds and characters. But consumer habits have changed, and D’Amaro, who led the Disney Parks division before succeeding Bob Iger as CEO earlier this year, acknowledged as much.
“Disney+ becomes the primary relationship between Disney and its fans, the place where everything comes together,” D’Amaro said during the company’s earnings conference call. However, D’Amaro continues to believe that theme parks are the beating heart of the brand, even though he said 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, comprehensive hub reaching millions of people who don’t read about the parks and therefore don’t spend money visiting them. For example, a Disney+ subscriber could stream a movie or show and then decide to plan a visit to a theme park, and they wouldn’t need to look anywhere other than the Disney+ app to find resources like guides, schedules, news, and announcements to help them establish 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 apps to drive engagement “could be the most important opportunity there is.” [we] have” when it comes to preventing churn on Disney+, AKA, the number of users who churn. But is pouring a large number of, let’s be honest, unrelated apps into a visual entertainment platform the key to achieving these goals?
We’ve seen this movie before with other tech giants. Back when Elon Musk was preparing to acquire Twitter (now But look how it happened.
In Disney’s case, it’s a more realistic idea given the synergy of its divisions, but whether it’s something Disney+ subscribers and movie fans have been asking for is a completely different debate.
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