Disney unveils bundle with Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu for $12.99/month

Yet another new subscription video bundle has been unveiled, for those of you keeping score at home. It’s an additional packaged offering from Disney, and it’s a good one — starting on November 12, as a complement to the company launching its much-anticipated Disney+ Netflix rival for $6.99, Disney will also launch a separate mega-bundle on that same day. Priced at $12.99, it will include a subscription to Disney+, ESPN+ as well as Hulu.

Let’s break that down a bit to see why that’s such a strong offering.

That bundle’s $12.99 price tag is a much better deal than the $17.97 you’d have to pay if you signed up for all three of those services individually ($6.99 for Disney+, $4.99 for ESPN+ and $5.99 for Hulu with ads).

Likewise, let’s stack that up against some Disney competitors.

The most popular Netflix subscription plan, its Standard plan with HD quality video, will set you back $12.99 — again, the same price you’re paying for these three Disney-owned services. Likewise, Amazon Prime costs $12.99 if you sign up for the monthly plan, while WarnerMedia’s HBO Max (which hasn’t priced its offering yet) is expected to cost $16 or $17 a month, (HBO Max being an all-new subscription that includes regular HBO plus a ton of additional content).

All of which is to say, this is an aggressively competitive move by Disney, to price its long-expected bundle of these three services at this price point. And it comes as the ordinary consumer is increasingly going to have to be picky about what they sign up for, given that new subscription packages keep rolling out and most people won’t want to (or be able to) sign up for everything.

In spite of this news, the crown jewel for Disney is still the Disney+ service itself that will be the streaming home for Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and so much more content. During the presentation, Disney CEO Bob Iger called the service “the most important product the company has launched in my tenure.”

International availability is not yet clear for the new $12.99 package, and while there’s nothing definitive to share yet on this front, Iger did add that the new package will most likely be available to buy through “Amazon, Apple, and other distributors.”

“The positive response to our direct-to-consumer strategy has been gratifying, and the integration of the businesses we acquired from 21st Century Fox only increases our confidence in our ability to leverage decades of iconic storytelling and the powerful creative engines across the entire company to deliver an extraordinary value proposition to consumers,” Iger said in a press release about the news.