Outside the US, Disney+ has long had six main tiles on its homepage. Alongside Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic, there was a sixth tile marked “Star” and it was here that wonders waited.
Behind this tile was all the content from Disney’s acquisition and it was spectacular. You never quite get over the small frisson of naughtiness that you get from firing up a Disney product to go and watch Predator.
Die Hard, Alien, The Old Man, 24, The Hot Zone, Sons Of Anarchy, Futurama… it was all there and included in the price of your Disney+ subscription. In these chaste times of the cost of living crisis, it made Disney+ probably move from the column marked “Potential Reduction” to “Keep” on the family budget spreadsheet.
The US is now catching up. All this stuff lived on a separate subscription to Disney-owned Hulu in the USA. The merging of Disney+ and Hulu together into one service was long rumored and recently announced. Now the beta version combining the two has launched. The Hulu tile was added to the homepage yesterday on some subscriptions for testing.
The tile will be available to anyone with both a Disney+ and a Hulu subscription, combining them into one place.
This will also know if you sign up for advertising-supported or ad-free tiers of the individual services and will adjust them automatically for you. If you’re an ad-free Disney+ user but on an ad-supported Hulu tier, it will only show ads on the Hulu series, and vice versa. Enhanced parental controls have also been added to the service as part of the roll-out to protect little ones from too many episodes of American Dad.
For US citizens, Disney and Hulu remain separate subscriptions so users can subscribe to one or both.
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