Disney Will Run Ads For Starz On Disney+ To Get Streaming Rights Back To ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ And More
By Ethan Anderton/Nov. 5, 2019 10:30 am EST
This new deal is all in service of ensuring that Disney+ has the most expansive catalog of Disney-owned titles available in their streaming library on launch day next week. And it’s in direct opposition to the original plan for Disney+ to be an ad-free streaming platform. In the end, there aren’t really any ads within the streaming service itself, unlike ad-supported versions of Hulu, for example. But this is still something Disney+ surely would have rather avoided, especially since they’ve been actively avoiding advertising for other streaming services like Netflix on some of the channels they own.
Efforts to gather up the movies with different licensing deals for streaming elsewhere were revealed to The Verge in August when Michael Paull, head of Disney streaming services, told them:
Indeed, the library of titles available is rather impressive, even if it doesn’t include a lot of the biggest hits from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s a good chance that we won’t see all of those movies on Disney+ at the same time in the early days of the service, though it’s not impossible to happen at some point.
“I think, as you can see from what we’re making available, and from seeing some of the titles that we’re making available at launch, there’s been a lot of effort that went into bringing it all back together so that we could make it available on the service.”
