If you are a fan of classic cartoons, you may soon need to pay for an extra. Hulu has announced that starting March 1st, Hulu with Live TV will no longer offer Boomerang as part of its standard package.
If you want Boomerang with Hulu, you will need to pay an extra $7.99 for the Entertainment add-on from Hulu.
This move is very much in line with Disney’s master plan to make streaming profitable. Dropping channels that are not as popular also helps Hulu keep costs down. Earlier this month, Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, announced plans to focus on Making Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ profitable.
“The Board is overseeing important strategic changes that our CEO Bob Iger is executing, such as putting more decision-making into the creative teams, implementing a cost reduction plan, prioritizing streaming profitability and improving the guest experience in our parks.” Disney’s said in the letter to shareholders.
It has been reported that Disney+ and Paramount+ are not expected to be profitable until 2024 or 2025 if everything goes well. Now it seems that Disney wants to move that date up as much as possible.
What is clear is that most streaming services right now are not profitable. Even large well, known streaming services are still not profitable in 2023. So how Disney plans to make their services profitable is unknown but there is a growing movement within the industry to cut back on the amount of original content, focus on offering ad-supported options, and more. Disney is already offering an ad-supported version it is possible that Disney could join the likes of Warner Bros. Discovery to cut back on content costs and even license some of it to other ad-supported services.
Disney has also announced that it is going to be more careful about what sports deal it makes with ESPN along with ESPN+. It will be interesting to see if Hulu moving Boomerang is just the first step in a bigger push to make the services more profitable.