Disney+ Gets First Live Series As 'Dancing With The Stars' Moves From ABC

The long-running ABC series “Dancing with the Stars” is moving to Disney+, becoming the first live series to be presented on the streaming service.

What Happened: “Dancing with the Stars” premiered in 2005 and has occupied the Monday evening at 8 p.m. ET time slot for 30 seasons. The switch from the television network to the streamer will encompass the show’s 31st and 32nd seasons, and the show will only available to U.S. and Canadian subscribers.

According to a Deadline report, ABC sent an advisory notice to its affiliates that the “Dancing with the Stars” time slot in the fall schedule will be partially filled with NFL football.

“After over 30 seasons of the program on ABC, including two spin-offs, 'Dancing with the Stars' will move off of ABC this fall in order for the Network to showcase several Monday Night Football games as well as develop and invest in new and future programming,” said the network in its advisory.

Both ABC and Disney+ are divisions of the Walt Disney Co. DIS.

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Why It Happened: Disney+ is catching up with other streaming services that have been slowly moving into live shows: Paramount+, the Paramount Global PARAA service, livestreamed part of this year’s Tony Awards while Amazon AMZN Prime Video recently presented the entirety of the American Country Music Awards.

But Disney+'s gain is ABC’s loss — outside of news and sports programming, the network's live entertainment productions are limited to occasional awards shows and finale episodes of “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette.”

However, the migration to streaming is also a lifeline to “Dancing with the Stars,” which saw its popularity declining in recent years. According to CheatSheet.com, the show averaged 4.89 million viewers in Season 30, down from the average of 6.19 million viewers in season 29 and further down from the average of 6.73 million viewers in season 28.

The show had been trying to reanimate itself by having supermodel Tyra Banks replace longtime hosts Tom Bergeron and Erin Andrews in the 29th season and by having contestant JoJo Siwa perform with a same-sex dance partner in the 30th season, but the inability to reverse its fortunes raised speculation that the program would be canceled.

Photo courtesy ABC.