From Mickey to Marvel to Merida, all of your Disney movies are about to have a new home.
Today sees the release of Disney's long-promised Disney Movies Anywhere app for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. This single app gives you access to any Disney (or Marvel!) flick that you own digitally, whether you purchased it through iTunes or redeemed the "digital copy" code included with a Blu-ray or DVD disc. After linking your Disney Online account and your iTunes account, everything appears in the app.
While today's launch is exclusively on Apple devices, Jamie Voris, Walt Disney Studios chief technology officer, says we should expect it to roll out on other devices. "It's designed to be easily pluggable into other people's systems," Voris says. "We're working very hard to make that happen."
The app doesn't let you access films that aren't already available through iTunes (according to Disney, 420 of them are), but it does offer a number of major improvements over simply watching your movies through the stock iOS experience.
Most importantly, while you can still download movies to your device to watch wherever you are, the Movies Anywhere app also supports streaming. Now you needn't have all your movies on your device to watch them. If you've registered a "digital copy" code with Disney, you can stream that movie through the Movies Anywhere app.
There's a great deal more digital content for each movie when you load it through the app. In your iTunes library, all you can do is watch the main Wreck-It Ralph feature. In Disney Movies Anywhere, you can stream deleted scenes and other bonus content, plus the Paperman short, if you own the movie.
Everything in the app is PG-13 or tamer, says Voris, so parents have no worries about handing a phone to the kids and letting them stream anything from within Disney Movies Anywhere. There also are parental controls to lock out PG-13 or PG content as well.
The app also lets you bookmark your favorite features and movies – bookmark Paperman and it'll stay in your Favorites folder so you don't need to navigate through Wreck-It Ralph's menu to find it again.
Additionally, while it's unclear how compelling this will be at first, Voris says Disney will load the app with exclusive content—"bloopers, behind-the-scenes, premieres, archive content—things that have never been seen digitally, and many of them have never been seen publicly for a long time." All of this content will be free, he says, although you can only stream it. No downloads.
Disney will be adding this content on an "aggressive schedule," Voris says, and doesn't plan to remove any clips or cycle them out of the app after a predetermined window.
To get people to download the app and link their accounts, Disney is offering a substantial incentive: you'll get Pixar film The Incredibles for free just for signing up.
Disney Movie Rewards, the company's customer loyalty program that awards points and prizes for purchasing and registering software, will be integrated into the app, so you can earn points for your digital purchases.
And there's one more big upside to do your Disney buying digitally this week – its megahit Frozen was released on iTunes today, weeks before it will appear on Blu-ray.
