Disney Plus tries a new AI-powered search
The Verge Jay Peters
Disney Plus is testing an AI search tool that builds custom rows of shows based on typed or spoken prompts. It's a small beta for now, but Disney wants Plus to be the company's streaming centerpiece.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Jay Peters — read the original for the full story.
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Disney is quietly rolling out a new way to dig through its Disney Plus catalog. Instead of just scrolling past algorithmically sorted rows based on your watch history, you'll be able to type a natural language query, speak a voice request, or tap a suggested prompt, and the service will build a custom row of movies and shows around it. Disney is calling it a limited beta experiment, currently running with a small group of select subscribers, and the pitch is content that fits the moment rather than content that fits your past viewing habits.
This isn't happening in a vacuum. Netflix has been testing an OpenAI-powered conversational search tool since last year, alongside a native voice search feature it already offers. Warner Bros. Discovery said last week it's experimenting with a similar conversational search setup for HBO Max. And Peacock has gone a slightly stranger route, adding an AI version of Andy Cohen that narrates clips from Bravo. Every major streamer, it seems, has decided that the real bottleneck isn't content volume anymore. It's finding the right thing to watch inside a catalog that's grown too big to browse.
The timing lines up with comments from Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro during this week's earnings call, where he reaffirmed plans to make Disney Plus the digital centerpiece of the company. He talked about increased personalization, exclusivity, and subscriber benefits as the path forward, and this search tool is clearly part of that personalization push, even if it's still small and experimental.
Disney isn't stopping at Plus, either. The company is also introducing an AI-assisted conversational search experience for ESPN, and this one leans much closer to a standard AI chatbot than a recommendation engine. ESPN Search, currently in beta with a subset of users, lets people ask direct questions and get answers, stats, and recommendations pulled from what Disney describes as ESPN's vast sports knowledge ecosystem. Disney has even shared a GIF showing the tool in motion, which suggests this feature is a bit further along than the Plus experiment, even if both are still confined to limited testing groups.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Streaming search has quietly become the new arms race, and that says a lot about where these platforms think their real problem is. Nobody's short on content anymore; they're short on ways to help people actually find something worth watching. Disney testing this on a small beta group while its rivals do the same suggests none of them are fully confident yet, and rightly so, since a chatbot recommending you a rom-com is a much easier problem than one answering live sports stats accurately.”}}
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