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Comment by JakeTheAndroid | Hacker News Reader

Well this is already sort of the case. But instead of Netflix it's Hulu. Hulu was the sort of agnostic platform that included live TV and needed to be able to VOD all the shows available on live TV networks. Now, you bundle Hulu + ESPN + Disney. Until every company wanted their own streaming service, Hulu was where you could find broad network content. And they even have commercials, so it worked great by classical TV metrics.

The issue is, Hulu created content is meh. Hulu's UI is meh. And Hulu doesn't aggregate ESPN+ and Disney+ in a single pane. And now everyone wants to own their own cut of the streaming service pie. So there was a push for this type of service that saw the incumbents rallying together against Netflix. For whatever reason that wasn't good enough for them, so the idea that now they will just partner with Netflix seems unlikely.

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> And Hulu doesn't aggregate ESPN+ and Disney+ in a single pane.

My Hulu shows aggregated ESPN+ in the "Live TV" category (which does show up on the Home Hub as well). It's quite obvious to me because that and HBO (incidentally) are the only "Live TV" I pay for so all I see in the Live TV section at all are ESPN+ and HBO.

Disney+ aggregation isn't there in Hulu, but the opposite is definitely already happening: a bunch of Hulu shows are now aggregated in Disney+ for me. Though the border between "aggregated there" and "slowly moving there" is quite blurry as Disney does seem keen to move towards Disney+ as the final brand left standing and eventually killing the Hulu brand. This is already the case in most of the world (Star+ which was the Indian sub-continent Hulu equivalent that Disney also outright bought is a "hub" in Disney+ rather than the other way around, despite predating Disney+ by several years just like Hulu; incidentally Disney did integrate a Star+ hub into Hulu in the US if you were curious what some of that content looks like), so it does seem inevitable in the US eventually Hulu will be eaten by Disney+.

(The one weird twist to that being how protective Disney as a brand has been of their family friendly part of their brand image in the US and in their merger of Fox and Hulu they found it useful to treat the Hulu brand as "Disney After Dark" and avoid some of the "family friendly" issues in the first few months of Disney+ while they added parental controls and other family focused tools after the US launch date. Disney will get to unwind the concept that they need a "Disney After Dark" that their own PR created in the first place in order to eventually merge Hulu into that plus in Disney+.)

Thanks for the update on that. I went back and checked and you're correct ESPN+ is there for Live TV. I just also happen to pay for Hulu Live, so it gets a bit buried. But it is in fact there.

I then went and checked Disney+ and you're also correct. Some of the Hulu content is now on that app. But yeah, its almost like completely random content was moved over, so it seems like its just easier to go to Hulu for now. But it's been clear for a while that Hulu is dying slowly.

For a while it seemed like Hulu was the path to killing Netflix but that floundered out years ago. And now everyone has their own service, so it seems very unlikely its worth trying to rebuild off Hulu at all. We'll see how Disney deals with the more adult/dark content on their platform but that seems like a better problem to solve than having 3 different platforms for streaming stuff. I do wonder if they will care at all about live streaming though; it costs a lot of money and idk how good the margins are.

Yeah, my Hulu account dates back to an early Beta key from a friend then working at GE Appliances, and I've maintained an active subscription on my Hulu account through more years than my Netflix account, so there's an interesting sense of nostalgia/loss in assuming the Hulu brand will be dead soon and even if it manages to remain a zombie brand for a while (if for no other reason than the "After Dark" problem), the Disney era of Hulu which started just a few months back when Comcast sold their last shares of Hulu to Disney is already a different Hulu from the Hulu that once thought it could be a multi-provider aggregator platform to truly rival the cable companies. (Not that Disney killed that vision, Comcast did their part to kill that vision when they bought majority ownership from GE along with NBC Universal.)

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