Four years ago, The Walt Disney Co. seized control of its streaming destiny. Instead of continuing to provide content to the likes of Netflix, it rounded up its storied brands—Disney itself, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, National Geographic—and folded them into a family-friendly video platform called Disney Plus. The result of intensive planning and investment, the service launched with great expectations and met them, signing up 10 million subscribers on its launch day. It reached 87 million in its first year, and had 164 million by the time it celebrated its second anniversary.

Months before Disney Plus’s debut, Disney had filled in another part of its streaming strategy when it acquired most of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets. The $71 billion acquisition gave it a controlling interest in Hulu, the venerable streaming service whose value proposition—something for everybody, including vast quantities of programming aimed at adults—complemented Disney Plus’s family focus. Last month, Disney announced plans to bring Hulu fully in-house by acquiring the remainder from Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

From the start, Disney Plus subscribers could opt for a package deal that also included Hulu (as well as ESPN Plus). This bundle offered a wealth of stuff, initially for the bargain price of $13 a month. Yet it didn’t represent a real unification of Disney’s streaming options. Disney Plus remained Disney Plus, Hulu remained Hulu, and subscribers had to traverse between two entirely different apps to watch everything they were paying for.

Now, with a new beta version of the Disney Plus app that launched this week, The Kardashians and Only Murders in the Building will coexist with Bambi and more variations on Star Wars than I can keep track of, all in one place. That’s because the beta incorporates nearly all of Hulu’s content into the Disney Plus interface. (A subset restricted by licensing agreements will remain absent, as will Hulu’s live TV service—and the stand-alone Hulu app isn’t going anywhere.)

For bundle subscribers, this integration means easier access to more entertainment options, including Hulu Originals as well as shows from a bevy of sources: broadcast networks, cable classics such as MTV and History, and beyond. But for Disney, making it possible required paying off years of the kind of technical debt that accumulates when you operate multiple services and often don’t have time to stop and think about their future.

“While the launch of this will be a simple Hulu button in the [Disney Plus] app, the complexity underneath to deliver that to you has [required] a lot of work,” says Aaron LaBerge, the president and CTO of Disney Entertainment and ESPN. “For example, the content libraries between Hulu and Disney Plus—over 70,000 pieces of content—were encoded differently. The playback output had different specifications. The metadata attached to each of those assets was different.”

By streamlining the process of putting video anywhere someone might want to watch it, Disney isn’t just making it possible for Hulu to have a home inside Disney Plus. It’s also making........

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