With over a hundred streaming services competing on content, the real threat to Disney wasn't a better competitor. It was irrelevance.

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In February 2019, a year before the pandemic made social isolation impossible to ignore, I led my team in creating Disney Fusion.

 

The research was stark: adults spent an average of six hours a day watching entertainment, yet 56% watched alone, with fewer than 37 minutes available for meaningful time with the people they loved. Streaming had made content frictionless while making connection harder.

Fusion's answer was a merged model, Entertainment plus Togetherness, combining AI and expression recognition to address unmet needs around discoverability, trust and genuine relevance. The intent was an experience intelligent enough to get out of the way: no paralysis of choice, no irrelevant recommendations, no friction between the content and the people watching it.

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The proposition wasn't a better video store. It was a fundamentally different reason to watch, one that made Disney's content the centre of people's lives together, not just their evenings alone.