On my recent Florida vacation, I managed to wrangle a meeting with some high ranking officials at Disney World.  They wanted me to wait until today to release this news as they are working furiously with Microsoft to arrange a strategic merger.

Disney has been dominant in the media for family entertainment for decades.  They also have the theme park market sewn up quite nicely and have recently moved into the cruise and adventure vacation markets.

One are which they have been eying is the online, social media market.  After exploring possibilities with Google, Facebook and Twitter, executives approached Microsoft to see what they could work out together.

Needless to say, Microsoft was very excited at the prospect of a little Disney Magic to help them move Bing to the top of the search engine world.  So talks began in earnest in December of last year.

What is expected to be announced today is a joint venture tentatively called MicroDisney.  This will result in the formation of a social media site based upon the Disney experience but powered by Microsoft.  It will be closely tied to Bing for search.

MicroDisney will also be leveraging the Disney properties to help generate ad income with electronic advertising being added to all the Disney theme parks, resorts and vacation properties (including the cruise lines).

“This is just the beginning,” my contact told me.  “We’re looking at adding live ads to Disney media products as well.  We’ve incorporated Microsoft adCenter into the Blu Ray and DVD’s that are coming on the market.  And there is an interactive component to it that will allow them to chat with other viewers watching the movie and send messages to various social media sites right from their DVD players.  With Microsoft’s help, we’ve found a way to use JScript to push adCenter content onto existing DVD’s that people have in their homes.”

Unfortunately, they still haven’t figured out how to add this functionality to VHS tapes, but they say they have some promising technological advances that may help with that.

All I can say to that is “I Slap Floor”.