Your Hometown News, Now Between Marvel Movies
Disney+ subscribers can now stream 24/7 local news from eight ABC-owned stations, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, and Fresno, marking the first time a major entertainment platform has bundled municipal news feeds with its superhero franchises and animated classics. The feature, launched February 24, places breaking news about Fresno traffic accidents in the same content library as *Encanto*, completing a quiet migration: civic information has moved from public airwaves to proprietary streaming platforms, where access to your city council coverage now costs $7.99 monthly.
The Walt Disney Company announced the expansion in a corporate release, positioning it as enhanced value for existing subscribers. But the selection reveals the underlying logic. These aren't the eight cities with the worst news deserts or the greatest civic information gaps. They're the eight markets where Disney already owns the ABC affiliate, WABC-TV in New York, KABC-TV in Los Angeles, WLS-TV in Chicago, WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, KTRK-TV in Houston, KGO-TV in San Francisco, WTVD-TV in Raleigh-Durham, and KFSN-TV in Fresno.
Infrastructure follows property lines.
How Public Airwaves Became Subscription Content
Local television news was built on a different model. Broadcast licenses granted by the Federal Communications Commission required stations to serve "the public interest, convenience, and necessity", a mandate that treated local news as civic infrastructure, not entertainment product. Anyone with an antenna could access it. The system had obvious flaws: advertiser-driven sensationalism, shallow coverage of complex policy, the tyranny of the evening time slot. But it was free, and it was universal.
Cable bundling changed the economics without changing the access model. Local news became part of a package deal, but near-universal cable penetration meant most households still received it. The cost was hidden in monthly bills rather than charged per channel.
Streaming broke that equilibrium. As audiences migrated from cable to on-demand platforms, local news lost its distribution infrastructure. Stations maintained websites and apps, but discoverability collapsed. A local news app competes with TikTok, Instagram, and every other notification demanding attention. An entertainment platform with 150 million subscribers offers something else: guaranteed placement in front of an existing audience.
Disney's move makes explicit what's been happening gradually. Local news survives by becoming content rather than infrastructure, one tile among thousands, algorithmically sorted alongside cooking shows and crime dramas.
Eight Cities, 342 Left Out
The U.S. Census Bureau recognizes 350 metropolitan statistical areas. Disney+ now serves eight of them with local news streams. The gap isn't an oversight, it's the model. Disney doesn't own ABC affiliates in the other 342 markets. Those stations, operated by other broadcast groups like Sinclair, Nexstar, or Tegna, would need to negotiate their own streaming deals, likely with different platforms. A resident of Nashville, Sacramento, or Detroit won't find their local news on Disney+, not because Disney chose to exclude them, but because the infrastructure now requires vertical integration to function.
The announcement from The Walt Disney Company describes the streams as featuring "live, market-specific newscasts" and "breaking news coverage," available through the ABC News Hub alongside national programming like *World News Tonight* and *Good Morning America*. The company did not specify whether the eight-city rollout represents a pilot program with plans for expansion or the full scope of the initiative.
That silence is telling. If Disney planned to add more cities, the announcement would likely preview future markets to build anticipation. The absence of expansion language suggests this is the natural boundary, local news becomes a streaming perk only where corporate ownership already exists.
The Economics That Forced This Shift
Local television news has been hemorrhaging revenue for over a decade. Digital advertising never compensated for the collapse of print classifieds and the decline of broadcast viewership. Stations cut reporting staff, consolidated operations, and automated production. Many markets now receive "local" newscasts produced in distant cities, with anchors reading scripts about communities they've never visited.
Disney isn't solving that crisis. The company is leveraging existing assets, studios, production infrastructure, and content libraries already producing local newscasts, by distributing them through a platform with massive reach. For Disney, the cost is minimal: streaming infrastructure already exists, and the content is already being produced for broadcast. For subscribers, it's added value that might reduce churn. For the eight cities included, it's expanded access to local news, particularly for residents who've cut cable but still want weather forecasts and traffic updates.
For everyone else, it's evidence that local news now operates like any other scarce resource: distributed according to market logic rather than civic need.
What Gets Lost in the Translation
Placing local news inside an entertainment platform changes its function in subtle ways. Broadcast news interrupts, it breaks into programming, commandeers the screen during emergencies, operates on a schedule that structures daily life. Streaming news competes. It's one option in a grid of thumbnails, subject to the same attention economy as every other piece of content.
The user experience matters. A subscriber scrolling through Disney+ to find something to watch encounters local news as content to be consumed, not infrastructure to be accessed. The framing is different. The expectation is different. Local news becomes something you choose when you're in the mood for it, rather than something that finds you when you need it.
Emergency alerts still function through phones and broadcast interruptions. But the ambient awareness that came from local news as default, the weather forecast you absorbed while waiting for prime time, the city council story you half-watched during dinner, disappears when news becomes opt-in content buried in a streaming library.
The Uncomfortable Rescue
Disney isn't the antagonist in this story. The company is doing what corporations do: finding efficiencies, leveraging assets, adding value for customers. If local news survives in any form, it will likely be through arrangements like this, bundled with entertainment subscriptions, subsidized by franchise IP, distributed through platforms built for different purposes.
The alternative is worse. Without distribution deals, local news continues its decline into irrelevance, kept alive by skeleton crews producing content for shrinking audiences. At least Disney+ offers reach.
But the model reveals what we've lost. Local news was supposed to be infrastructure, not a perk. Access was supposed to be universal, not dependent on which corporation owns your city's station and which streaming service you subscribe to. The eight cities getting this feature are fortunate. The 342 others are learning what it means when civic information becomes proprietary.
Disney has not announced plans to expand beyond the eight markets where it already owns stations.
The geography of informed citizenship is now determined by media consolidation maps drawn decades ago for entirely different purposes.
We wanted local news to survive. We just didn't imagine survival would mean becoming another thumbnail in someone else's entertainment grid.