DisneyLife aims to be Disney's all-in-one streaming platform

As one of the biggest media companies on Earth, it's little surprise that Disney has entered the streaming media arena, with its new DisneyLife service recently launching in the UK.

Available on iOS and Android, DisneyLife aims to deliver a bit more than the video-only offerings of Netflix or Amazon Instant video though. It positions itself as an all-in-one "experience", combining on-demand access to classic movies and family TV shows with a library of music from Disney recording artists, children's books, and free games added regularly. It also provides rarities -- shorts, extras and spin-offs, some not available anywhere else, all available in the one app.

WIRED speaks with Paul Brown, general manager of DisneyLife UK, and Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president at Disney Labs, on bringing the company's creative heritage into one app, how the rise of streaming video has affected DisneyLife, and how thinking like a start-up helped its development.

**WIRED: How did you go about presenting the various types of content in DisneyLife, all in one app?**Paul Brown: I think what we've tried to do is create a very simple and familiar UI, but really try to bring character to the fore. Whether it be going into the movie titles or character icons themselves, you can explore content through character worlds, that's where we've found people were really engaging in a really good way. Kyle lead the design and development of the product, but that [character side] was where I was coming from on it.

Kyle Laughlin: One of the things that I think we're most proud of and what we feel is most interesting is a new way to interact with our characters and stories in a much more deep and meaningful way. We created a new technology that we called Multiplane, and it's a really dynamic system that's deeply integrated into the DisneyLife product. It has some of our most advanced engineering [and] was inspired by the multiplane camera than Walt Disney used on Snow White. We created a proprietary toolset that allows designers and producers to create those experiences, make that connection between characters. That's been our focus on personalising the application.

**Some Disney content is available on other streaming services -- will we see shows and movies become exclusive to DisneyLife?**PB: What we're trying to do here is create a really deep and rich, multi-content experience. For me, the focus has been as much around character and story. There's the movies, but we're also able to bring the books, and the music, and the TV shows -- really bring collections together, and curate them. It's not so much about exclusivity, it's really about trying to bring the wealth and depth of what we've got in terms of almost a hundred years' heritage into one experience. For me, that's one of the things I'm really excited and proud about with what we've brought out here.

And then there's the short-form, bonus content, featurettes -- if you go into Toy Story, you're not just there to watch Toy Story, you can find yourself wanting to go into the books, or watch some of the shorts, which you may never have seen before. Plus we have all the mini-movies -- Frozen Fever, Feast, these 7-10 minute movies that adults and kids love to dive into. I think that curation, bringing it together, that makes it unique.

**Is DisneyLife envisioned as a way to bring those rarer pieces of content to viewers?**PB: I think it really is. The audience -- Disney fans, kids, parents -- they don't think in "content silos". You just want to bring everything together. When Kyle and the design team were thinking about this in the early days, it was about "how do we bring these characters and stories to life?" People want to watch the movies over and over again, we know that, but to be able to go deep into that and find stuff that you don't expect to see, only we were placed to do that.

**There used to be the Disney Vault rule, taking movies out of availability for home viewing. Is that part of the past now DisneyLife offers on-demand streaming?**PB: For a lot of the content and films, you've got our classics brought together under the "Classic Movies" banner on the home screen of the app -- we're not moving those off. We've got lots of great partners and we support lots of channels -- we want people to be able to experience our content wherever they want to. But with DisneyLife, what we tried to do was bring a collection together that stays with you. It's not about windowing things in and out, it's very much about creating an experience where the lion's share of content is there and staying there.

**Disney isn't just "core" Disney anymore -- the company also owns Marvel, Star Wars, and dozens of other properties. Will those be integrated into DisneyLife eventually?**PB: What's exciting is there's lots of different directions to take -- it's not static, it doesn't stand still. We want to focus though; focus is so important to create something simple and engaging but rich. So we wanted to focus on a Disney and Pixar branded experience, and we feel there's an enormous amount in there, we're very excited about what we have. Where we go with that, who knows? There's lots of different opprtunities, including those incredible, iconic brands in Marvel and Star Wars, and we'll see where we go with it.

**How did DisneyLife come about to begin with?**KL: We started with a question, of how we bring Disney's stories and characters to life in a modern way for families today, and DisneyLife is a culmination of a lot of work and experience in the entertainment space to leverage technology to provide that new way. We were fortunate in that we had broad licence across the whole company to experiement.

We had a start-up mentality -- we were a small team that has the same kind of entrepreneurial mindset that the company is built on. We started very simply, working on a whiteboard and building up from there. We took about two years to prototype, to refine and influence where we wanted to go to ensure that we could deliver something that lived up to the expectations of all our fans.

**What sort of user feedback have you had so far?**KL: We've had some great oppotunities to get this in front of thousands of users across multiple markets, and we've been hearing the simplicity of the experience has been most important. It's a huge challenge to bring together all of these different content types into a single experience, and I think parents in particular value that they can get all of this into a single kid-safe, family friendly experience.

**The streaming video market has changed and evolved rapidly in just the last couple of years -- has that affected the development of the product?**KL: We've had the opportunity to work across multiple timezones and locations to leverage the best of the talent across the company to tackle some of those challenges. Fortunately, we've built a product and a platform that ultimately allowed us to move very quickly, to not only anticipate changes but also to react as we were building it. We were incredibly nimble as we were darting along that course.

PB: One of the genuinely fun things that Kyle and I have been able to do has been being able to work with some of the best technologists and creatives in the company. Going that extra mile of pulling right the way across video, books, music, and being able to say "there's more" -- it took time, but it was part of the fun. It's an ongoing journey but incredibly fun.

**When was it decided to add content beyond movies to DisneyLife?**PB: It was very much at the heart of the vision -- it was about the characters and the stories, and not about "content". It was a big part of that vision, the technology's there and it felt really right. We wanted to take the time to think it through and really go fast once we had a plan. From the beginning there was that realisation that we could launch lots of different content services, but wouldn't it be fantastic to bring it into one? That meant having a video player, and a book reader, and a music player, and then bringing the apps into it, and integrating all of those into one experience.

We certainly didn't have the answers on day one, but we wanted to do that, it was very deliberate. We hope that people will engage in that in a very different way, because they can just get lost in it and immerse themselves in it.

**To be hardball -- at £9.99 per month, DisneyLife is more expensive than Netflix. Why should families opt for it as an entertainment package?**PB: When I look at DisneyLife, this is to me a multi-content, multimedia experience. When you can bring more than 300 movies, phenomenal movies, but also 5000 Disney music tracks, over 2300 TV box sets, 130+ books, an app a month -- and these are premium apps that you'd go and buy on the app store for a price -- and other things that we want to bring into the service over time, I just think it's a great value. I believe that's a price that reflects the heritage, the brand, and what we've got in there. I'm excited to bring it to market!

**How do you see DisneyLife growing?**PB: We're laser-focused on launching first. We've developed the ability to have multi-language and we can add languages to the service. We don't have a firm rollout plan but we really want to focus on the UK, deliver and build an audience here, and then look at other parts of Europe and hopefully beyond.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK