Disney’s BAMTech unit has appointed Kevin Swint as senior vice president and general manager for its upcoming branded streaming service due to launch in 2019.
Swint arrives at BAMTech after spending parts of his career with Apple and Samsung. According to Variety, Swint will report directly to BAMTech CEO Michael Paull.
Last summer, Disney announced it was buying a controlling stake in BAMTech around the same time it revealed its plans to launch both an ESPN streaming service, which arrives this year, and a Disney branded streaming service that will house its Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars films along with some original programming.
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Disney CEO Bob Iger last year wouldn’t reveal specifics about pricing for the ESPN- or Disney-branded streaming services launching soon, but he did say that the Disney service will be priced “substantially” lower than Netflix.
“That is in part reflective of the fact that it will have substantially less volume. It will have a lot of high quality because of the brands and franchises that will be on it, but it will simply launch with less volume and the price will reflect that.”
Disney last year also announced plans to acquire certain 21st Century Fox entertainment assets in a $52.4 billion stock transaction.
In terms of Fox’s intellectual property (IP) and how it will fit into the upcoming Disney streaming product, Iger said that a lot of Fox’s IP—like the National Geographic cable channel and Fox’s Marvel properties including X-Men and Fantastic Four—will fit extremely well into the Disney-branded streaming service.
“[Fox] also makes a lot of product that we believe will be of great use, as it already is, to growing Hulu,” Iger said. He added that Disney considers Hulu—of which it will own 60% following the Fox deal—as more of an adult product that will benefit from programming like FX series.