Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro is stacking his leadership team with Silicon Valley talent, promoting a former YouTube and Google veteran to oversee the company's streaming empire as part of a sweeping corporate restructuring.
D'Amaro on Monday named Adam Smith chairman of the Direct-to-Consumer division within Disney Entertainment, handing the ex-Google product manager control over strategy, platform development, and engineering for both Disney+ and Hulu. Smith joined Disney in 2024 after years at YouTube, where he served as vice president of product management for YouTube Music and Premium, subscriptions, and commerce platforms. Before that, he worked on Google Fiber, Google Books, Google News, and Google Finance.
The appointment is the clearest signal yet that D'Amaro, who took over as CEO in March, replacing Bob Iger, intends to run Disney more like a tech company than a traditional Hollywood studio. His stated goal: a unified "One Disney" model where the company's global businesses are, in his words, "aligned and working in a connected way" so Disney can "build on our strengths, reach people wherever they are, and deepen their relationship with Disney."
Smith will not simply manage a content library. His portfolio now includes adtech, emerging technologies, programming strategy, viewer experience, partnerships, and data and analytics, a scope that reads more like a tech-platform chief operating officer than a traditional media executive. The Wrap reported that D'Amaro's broader vision points toward a Disney "super-app" that would combine streaming, Walt Disney World theme park reservations, Lightning Lane line-skipping passes, and commerce into a single consumer product.
Disney President and Chief Creative Officer Dana Walden praised the move in a statement alongside Alan Bergman:
"Over the past two years, Adam has done an exceptional job building a world-class team of product and technology leaders and has significantly enhanced the Disney+ user experience globally. Alan Bergman and I are pleased to recognize the tremendous impact he has had on our direct-to-consumer business since he joined Disney, and we are confident that he is the right leader to meet the critical moment we're in and take us to the next level."
Smith struck a similar tone, framing Disney+ as the future hub for all fan engagement:
"Disney has the best storytellers and the most passionate fandom in the world, and I couldn't be prouder of what this team has built together. We've established real momentum, and our vision ahead is clear: make Disney+ the connection point for fans everywhere to engage with the full breadth and depth of the broader Disney ecosystem."
That language, "connection point," "ecosystem", is pure Silicon Valley. It tells you where the company's center of gravity is shifting.
While Smith rose, Hollywood veteran Joe Earley was moved to a newly created position: president of Disney Entertainment Television Franchise and Content Strategy. Earley will report to Debra O'Connell, who chairs Disney Entertainment Television and oversees the company's portfolio of television brands. The restructuring effectively separates the tech-and-platform side of the business from the content-and-franchise side, with a Google alumnus running the former and traditional entertainment executives managing the latter.
The broader reorganization extends beyond streaming. The New York Post reported that Walden is consolidating Disney's film, television, streaming, and gaming operations into a single unified division. O'Connell's elevated role now gives her oversight of ABC, Hulu Originals, National Geographic, and 20th Television. Disney's games unit, previously housed in the parks-focused Experiences division, has been pulled into the core entertainment arm, aligning gaming with Disney+ and Hulu for the first time.
Walden framed the consolidation as a response to shifting consumer habits, stating that fans now "engage with Disney across more formats and platforms than ever before" and that the company is "bringing together the full power of our creative businesses to build an even more connected experience for audiences."
Several concrete moves already underway show how fast D'Amaro is pushing this transformation. Disney+ and Hulu are on track to merge into a single standalone app by year's end. A TikTok pilot is launching in the United States in the coming months, designed to bring Disney-centric fan-created content into Disney+'s "Verts" short-form vertical video feed. And elements of the broader "One Disney" vision are expected to start appearing this spring.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Disney quietly took its Play Disney Parks app offline. That app had allowed guests at attractions like Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge to interact with in-park show elements through their phones. Whether its features will migrate into the planned super-app remains unclear, but the timing suggests the company is clearing the decks for a consolidated digital platform rather than maintaining a patchwork of standalone apps.
The super-app concept, if realized, would let a single Disney application handle everything from watching a new Marvel series to booking a theme park visit to buying merchandise. It is an ambitious bet that Disney can replicate the kind of all-in-one digital experience that tech giants have built, except wrapped around Disney's intellectual property.
D'Amaro has also discussed the benefits of artificial intelligence across the company, from improving search and recommendation features on Disney+ to speeding up the production process in the studio. He has insisted that the creative process will continue to be led by humans, a caveat that echoes talking points from other media executives navigating tension between AI efficiency and the creative workforce that actually makes the content people pay for.
That tension is not theoretical. Disney and OpenAI recently parted ways on a content deal involving OpenAI's now-scuttled Sora video app. The specifics of that deal and the reasons for its collapse remain unclear, but the breakup suggests Disney's AI strategy is still in flux, ambitious in rhetoric, messy in execution.
For a company whose competitive advantage has always rested on storytelling, the question is whether a tech-first leadership structure will sharpen that edge or dull it. Hiring a Google and YouTube veteran to run the streaming and platform side of the business signals that D'Amaro believes Disney's future depends less on the next great movie and more on the digital infrastructure that delivers it.
Strip away the corporate language and the picture is straightforward. D'Amaro inherited a company that spent years lurching between leadership changes and strategic pivots. His answer is to centralize everything, content, streaming, gaming, parks technology, advertising, under a tighter command structure and hand the technology keys to someone who built products at Google and YouTube, not at a Hollywood studio.
Whether that works depends on execution. Disney's content pipeline still needs to produce stories people want to watch. Its theme parks still need to deliver experiences worth the price of admission. And its streaming business still needs to prove it can generate durable profits, not just subscriber counts.
But the bet D'Amaro is making is clear: in a world where consumers interact with entertainment through apps, algorithms, and data-driven recommendations, the company that controls the platform wins. That is a tech company's worldview, not a studio's. And Disney just put a tech executive in charge of making it real.
Corporate America keeps learning the same lesson: you can reorganize the org chart all you want, but the customer only cares whether the product is worth the money, and right now, that is the one question Disney's leadership shuffle does not answer.