The future is throupling before our eyes.
We now know more about the streaming throuple that Hulu, Disney+, and Max are forming. This morning Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced several new details about their combined bundle offering — which they’re making available immediately. Starting today you can sign up for the new Disney+, Hulu, Max Bundle for either $16.99 per month for the ad-supported plan or $29.99 per month for the ad-free plan. The two companies note that the bundle is 38 percent cheaper than buying subscriptions for all three services separately. The ad-supported bundle, in fact, costs the same as buying an individual ad-free plan for Max. Depending on your tolerance for ads, maybe it’s a worth a switch to add shows like X-Men ’97 or Shōgun to your HBO binges.
As we noted in May, this has been coming for a while. The bundle is just the latest move in an industry rapidly consolidating and exploring new — but also obvious, in this case — ways to make money. As Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav put it last summer: “If we don’t do it to ourselves, I think it will be done to us.” Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV+ have also formed a triad of their own dubbed StreamSaver, available to Xfinity customers, and Venu — a bundled sports streamer from Warner, Fox, and Disney — is forthcoming, not to mention the various cell-phone plans that bundle the services as perks. Will half these streamers exist in five years? We’ll see.
