I Just Wanted to Watch the World Series

The other day, I wanted to watch the World Series. We don’t have cable, so I figured I’d add live TV to Hulu, which I’ve had for years. I wasn’t sure Hulu still offered live TV, but it seemed like the obvious place to start.

I went to hulu.com and got a page that treated me like a new customer. “Create Account” was the big black button, with “Manage Account” underneath it, and Live TV was listed in the footer, which was encouraging. I logged in, entered my password again, and landed on Hulu’s account page. It showed my plan, the Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max bundle, and next to it a link that said “Manage on Disney+.” I couldn’t change my Hulu plan from Hulu.

I created my Hulu account long before I had Disney+, so I assumed Hulu was the “parent” of whatever bundle I ended up with. At some point I either bought the bundle through Disney or merged the two accounts. I don’t remember which, and I don’t think I should have to. Hulu’s account page still shows my last payment as $95.99 in September of last year, so my best guess is that billing moved to Disney around then. Disney has been moving account management in that direction on purpose. In its third-quarter earnings commentary this year, it described letting Hulu subscribers manage their subscriptions on Disney+ as a milestone in combining the two apps.¹

So I opened the Disney+ app, picked my profile, entered my PIN, and went to Account. The app told me that “some account management features are only available via the website.”

On disneyplus.com, I got another “Create Account” button front and center. I logged in, went to Manage Your Account, then Your Subscription, then Change your plan. By my count, that was about 11 screens across Hulu’s website, the Disney+ app, and Disney’s website, with two separate sign-ins along the way.

The plan page listed 11 plans and two add-ons. Three of them cost $21.99, each with a different mix of services and ads. No plan included both HBO Max and ESPN, so adding sports meant giving up HBO Max. Neither Hulu nor HBO Max was offered on its own. Even the plans labeled “No Ads” noted that ads would be served in select live and linear content.² Live TV, which is what I came for, wasn’t one of the options.

In the end I gave up and subscribed to Fox One, which carried the games. A week later, when the World Series was over, I went to cancel and couldn’t remember how I’d signed up. I had to go looking, and it turned out I’d subscribed in the Fox One app and paid through Apple.

Which service is the parent?

Each of these services wants to be the home base: the place where you sign up, the account that holds your payment, and the hub other services attach to. That works when you have one or two services. It gets confusing when you have several, bundled in different ways and bought at different times, because you lose track of which company is billing you and none of the apps says so plainly. The same Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max bundle can be billed by Disney+, by Hulu, or by HBO Max, depending on where you bought it.³

The companies have the purchase records, so they know where my bundle started. Every screen I went through still asked me to reconstruct that history from memory. I don’t think about my subscriptions in terms of who bills me or where my account lives. I think of them by brand name, and none of these screens connected the two. In my case that’s three brands, two logins (MyDisney for Disney+ and Hulu, and a separate account for HBO Max),⁴ and, as of last month, two corporate owners. Disney owns Hulu, while HBO Max now belongs to Skydance, which completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6.⁵

How the org chart shows up

When Disney announced that it would fully integrate Hulu into Disney+, it said combining the apps would give subscribers a much better experience,⁶ and I expect most of the people working on it want that too. But a bundle starts as a business deal. The contract decides who bills you and who owns your account. Then each company builds its part into its own account system, and nobody is responsible for the experience across all of them, so the product ends up shaped like the org chart. Each screen I saw worked on its own; the login, the PIN, and the plan cards were all fine. The trouble was getting from one screen to the next, and no single team owns that path.

Streaming is starting to look like cable

Streaming started as the alternative to cable. You picked the services you wanted and cancelled the ones you didn’t. Now those services are consolidating and bundling, and the bundles are starting to look like cable packages. Cable was expensive, but you had one bill and one company to call when something went wrong. Streaming bundles are bringing back the cost and complexity of cable without a single company you can call. Sports are already there, with games split across enough services that following a full season means paying for several of them.

The easiest screen

The easiest part of the whole process was cancelling Fox One. Apple’s subscription page showed who bills me, what plan I have, what it costs, and when it ends, all on one card.

It worked because one company handled the billing, so there was one place to look. Apple’s list has limits, though. It only includes subscriptions bought from Apple or through an app in the App Store, so my Disney bundle isn’t on it.⁷ Apple also keeps a commission of up to 30% on subscriptions sold through the App Store,⁸ so it has its own reasons to want to be the hub. Still, it was the only place in this whole process where I could see everything about a subscription at once.

What bundles need

Bundles aren’t going away, and they can be a good deal. If companies are going to keep combining services, here’s what I’d want from them:

• Say who bills me. Every service in a bundle should show which company bills me and link straight to where I can manage it.
• Let me make changes from wherever I am. If Hulu’s account page knows I have a bundle, it should let me change that bundle instead of sending me to another company’s app.
• Show me what I gain and lose. When I switch plans, show what changes side by side, so I don’t have to work out that adding ESPN means losing HBO Max.
• Let me start with what I want to watch. I was looking for a baseball game, not a plan name. Let me search for the game and show me the cheapest way to get it.

I ended up watching the games on a service I’d never used before, paid for through Apple. For now, I still have the same bundle, and I still don’t know how I’d add live TV to it.

Footnotes

1. The Walt Disney Company, “Disney Q3 FY26 Earnings: Commentary from CEO Josh D’Amaro.” D’Amaro described “allowing Hulu standalone and bundle subscribers to link profiles and manage subscriptions on Disney+” as an app unification milestone. ↩

2. Disney+, “Enjoy no ads with Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Premium Bundle plans.” The no-ads plans note that “ads will be served in select live and linear content.” ↩

3. HBO Max Help Center, “Help with the Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max Bundle.” Disney+ subscribers sign up for the bundle through Disney, Hulu-billed subscribers sign up through Hulu, and HBO Max subscribers can sign up through HBO Max. Bundle subscribers then activate a separate HBO Max account. ↩

4. Disney+ Help Center, “Using your MyDisney login across multiple services.” One MyDisney email and password signs in to Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. ↩

5. Skydance Corporation, “Paramount Completes Acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Creating a New Global Entertainment Leader, Skydance,” press release filed with the SEC (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1), October 6, 2026. ↩

6. The Walt Disney Company, “Q3 FY25 Earnings Conference Call,” August 6, 2025. Bob Iger said subscribers would get “a far better consumer experience when those apps are combined.” ↩

7. Apple Support, “Cancel a subscription from Apple.” Subscriptions bought from another company have to be cancelled with the company that bills you. ↩

8. Apple Developer, “Auto-renewable subscriptions.” Developers receive 70% of the subscription price during a subscriber’s first year and 85% after one year of paid service. ↩