Just saw Hulu has officially merged with the Disney Plus app so i was excited to update the Vision Pro app yesterday thinking it would be the same as the phone but nope. Major bummer cus Hulu has some movies I’d really like to watch on the vision.
In my Disney+ on my Apple TV, the Hulu icon is labeled as Beta.
I don’t think Disney has had the time to actually merge their content libraries with Hulu and instead are merely passing through to Hulu’s CDN in their apps.
Which is to basically say, you’re going to need to wait for Disney to finish the *technical* side of the merger before these things are working.
As a Disney+ subscriber, you can enjoy your favorite films and series from the comfort of your home or take them with you on the go. Disney+ supports streaming
Bringing Hulu to Disney Plus sparked a bit of a tech revolution inside Disney.
www.theverge.com
Here’s just one example of what that looks like: Chris Lawson, the EVP of content operations at the company, estimates that Disney had to move more than 100,000 individual assets from Hulu to Disney Plus in order to make this work. “It’s a mixture of content that we own and content from our partners,” he says. Every partner shares that content in different ways, in different formats, with different metadata attached.
Hulu, a 16-year-old app, runs on a very different technological platform than the four-year-old Disney Plus. So Disney had to re-encode all the Hulu video files to work on Disney Plus, which it could have done in a relatively straightforward way, but instead, the company decided to use this opportunity to roll out a single content library system for everything, everywhere. That’s still in progress, LaBerge says: “that in and of itself has been a bit of a massive lift. But when it’s all said and done, we will have one master media library for the entire company that has the same consistent metadata formats, description of content, and playback encoding, that is the highest quality it can be for the entire Walt Disney Company.”
A lot of those 100,000 assets, by the way, aren’t video files. They’re artwork designed to be used in various places in the app, in email marketing blasts, on Hollywood billboards, and elsewhere. Disney Plus, a huge global service, requires content providers to include lots of this stuff alongside every title, up to twice as much as Hulu requires. So part of the process for Disney has been to adapt all that Hulu art and to bring everybody else up to Disney Plus standards going forward. “When the next Marvel movie comes out, there’s a specification for how the content needs to be delivered and what artwork is associated with it,” LaBerge says.
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This is why it will be a long time until everything on Hulu can work on Disney Plus.
It shows up in the visionOS Disney+ app for me and is labeled as "beta" as others have mentioned. This is the primary way I've been using Hulu on my Vision Pro and it has worked great so far. Much better than watching on Hulu's Safari site.
Pro tip - Disney Plus on visionOS doesn’t support ads yet … my plan is the ad free version of Hulu and the $2 ad supported version of Disney Plus (available if you pay for Hulu ad free) and have watched full movies and many episodes Disney Plus shows - not a single ad - wonder how long this magical ad free time will last!