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Attention other streaming services: in case you didn’t already know, Disney+ is a P-r-o-b-l-e-m with a capital P. Having only been around for six months, the Mouse House’s streaming service has already almost doubled Hulu’s viewership to rank as the third-most-popular streaming service.
While Disney+ still trailer Prime Video (150 million subscribers) and Netflix (193 million subscribers, roughly 20 million fewer people than the population of Brazil), it’s important to remember that Prime Video comes free with every Amazon Prime subscription, which leads me to believe why those numbers are so high. Don’t get me wrong, Prime Video is a decent service, but by no means is it that far superior to Hulu.
The data, provided by Variety, represents global subscribers as of January 2020 (aw, they included Quibi, that’s so cute).
Variety
Shares of the media giant were initially volatile in the after-hours session following its Q3 earnings announcement. Then shortly after the earnings conference call kicked off, the stock jumped 5% after Disney CEO Bob Chapek announced that as of Aug. 3, Disney+ had 60.5 million subscribers, up from 54.5 million in the beginning of May. [via Variety]
The Disney+ portion of the graph becomes even more mind-blowingly hilarious when considering that the House of Mouse was initially hoping to reach 60 million to 90 million subscribers by 2024. Granted, I wouldn’t put it past Disney to severely undersell expectations in order to manufacture this sort of reaction when they predictably blow past those numbers.
Due to Disney’s sheer scale — from its massive catalog of already-owned properties to its buying power that essentially allows them to snap up any company/franchise/intellectual property that they want –, it’s really only a matter of time until the service becomes Netflix’s primary competitor if that time has not already come.
While Disney+’s booming success will obviously terrify their competitors, Netflix likely need not worry, as they’ve not only built up a subscribed base that would make them the eighth most-populated country on the planet, but they’ve become synonymous with the concept of “streaming”.