Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have entered another streaming partnership.
Disney and WBD plan to begin offering the Disney+, Hulu and Max apps as a bundle starting this summer, it was announced Wednesday. While the new bundle does not include any sport-specific apps — like ESPN+ — Max offers a sports-focused add-on, Hulu streams all NHL regular season games carried by ESPN+, and even Disney+ next week will carry WNBA Opening Night.
The new bundle is just the latest streaming partnership between Disney and WBD. The two companies are in league with Fox Corporation on a new joint venture streaming service that is expected to debut later this year.
News of the bundle comes at a vulnerable time for WBD. In order to keep rights to the NBA, the company will have to outbid Comcast by paying at least $2.5 billion/year for a lesser package of rights than it currently owns. If it is unwilling — or unable — to do so, it faces a future without its most significant programming and the potential of billions of losses in carriage fees.
Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg reported Wednesday that WBD president and CEO David Zazlav has instructed executives to reduce costs, with the brunt of that expected to fall on the company’s streaming apparatus — which “could bear hundreds of millions of dollars in budget cuts.”
Unlike the joint venture between Disney, WBD and Fox, there is no reason to believe that the Disney-WBD bundle will pose a direct competitive threat to the existing streaming MVPDs such as YouTube TV and Fubo. Only the Hulu ad-supported and ad-free subscriptions were mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement, rather than the Hulu + Live TV option that competes directly with those MVPDs.