Star+

» see starplus.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Disney+ opened almost everywhere in 2020 and 2021 carrying a promise about itself, which was that anything inside it was fine for the whole house. In latin america the company was also sitting on live ESPN and an FX library that did not belong behind that promise. So on 31 august 2021 it opened a second till. Star+ had its own app and its own monthly price, running in nearly every ibero-american country except Cuba.

The name was in court before the service was even open. Starz argued that Star+ would get confused with its own brand across the region. The two sides settled during 2021 and Disney went ahead with it anyway. that fight is a large part of why latin america ended up with a whole separate product rather than a tab.

The Turkish end of this is quieter and it is the part i actually watched happen. Disney+ opened here on 14 june 2022 with the same FX and Hulu shelf that latin america was paying a second subscription for, sitting in a tab you could reach in two taps. Ours is not called Star either, because Star is a television channel in Turkey and the name was long gone. The tab here is called More Entertainment. Same catalog on two continents, and the shape it shipped in got decided by whoever already owned a five letter word locally.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ why there were two of them ~

Sport is most of the answer. ESPN in the region held football rights and Formula 1, and live sport does not behave like a back catalog. It needs its own scheduling and its own pricing (or whatever the internal term was). Disney sold Star+ on its own from roughly six dollars a month in Brazil up to about ten in Mexico, and sold a bundle called Combo+ that got you both apps for less than buying them apart.

The rest of the answer is that Disney+ had spent two years teaching people it was the safe one. Putting American Horror Story next to the animated films inside the same grid was a brand problem before it was a technical one. back then. Europe solved it with a hub and a profile lock in february 2021. latin america got told to download a second thing.

~ the merge ~

On 12 december 2023 Disney announced the reversal. The Star hub and an ESPN hub would arrive inside Disney+ in the region on 26 june 2024, and Star+ would stop existing. the standalone app was first given a closing date of 30 june, then pushed out to 24 july 2024 while subscribers were moved across.

Nothing was lost in the move, which is unusual for a grave on this site. The library went where it was told to go and the sport went with it. The subscription simply became a more expensive tier of one app instead of two separate apps. What died was the second bill and the second icon on the home screen.

~ what it leaves ~

Running two consumer apps in the same market costs real money twice, once in marketing and again in the support queue when a subscriber cannot remember which of the two their password belongs to. Disney worked that out three years in. Every other region had already been handed the cheaper answer at launch.

starplus.com resolves today and lands you on disneyplus.com. That is the entire epilogue. A streaming service that existed for thirty five months because of a trademark dispute and a family-friendly brand promise, folded into the app it was built to protect.

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