Disney partners with TikTok to bring fan videos to Disney+
Developing story first seen 3 hours ago
Disney is partnering with TikTok to pipe fan-made videos about Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and other franchises directly into Disney+, starting with a US pilot in the coming months before expanding to further markets. The content will appear in "Verts," the streamer's short-form video feed, as Disney seeks to bulk up the feed's content and compete with TikTok and other social platforms for viewers' attention. The tie-up follows the collapse of an earlier plan to let people generate Disney-character videos on OpenAI's Sora platform, after OpenAI abruptly shut Sora down in March.
Alongside the content deal, Disney has launched a Creator Ambassador Program giving TikTok creators access to its content library plus rewards, greater visibility, exclusive events and career opportunities, reflecting the company's recognition that emerging talent is building audiences on social media. Rivals Tubi and Peacock have already worked with TikTok creators on original long-form programming. The announcement coincides with Disney's latest quarterly results, in which streaming operating income more than doubled to $712 million from $329 million a year earlier, and a restructuring that moves the consumer products business from the Experiences division into Studios.
- Disney+ to feature TikTok fan videos via new "Verts" partnership
- Follows collapse of Disney's OpenAI Sora video deal
- Disney streaming profit more than doubled to $712m this quarter
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Disney+ is a streaming service that competes with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, drawing on Disney's back catalogue of franchises such as Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. Like several rival streamers, it has been experimenting with short-form video feeds, similar in style to TikTok, to keep people scrolling within its own app rather than switching to social media. This has proved difficult, because platforms like TikTok already have vast amounts of user-made content and established viewing habits that are hard to replicate from scratch.
TikTok is the short-video app owned by China's ByteDance, widely used for fan-made clips, edits and commentary about films, shows and characters. Disney had previously explored letting people create AI-generated videos of its characters using OpenAI's Sora tool, but that plan fell apart when OpenAI shut Sora down earlier this year, leaving Disney looking for another way to bring popular fan content into its own service.
This matters because streaming has become a key battleground for entertainment companies, with viewer attention increasingly split between traditional platforms and social media. Deals that bring creators and their audiences directly into a company's own app, rather than losing them to outside platforms, are seen as a way to boost engagement and, ultimately, revenue from streaming.
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Originally published by TechCrunch as “Disney+ looks to TikTok creators to bring fan content to its short-form video feed”.