The Walt Disney Company’s new video streaming service Disney+ has gotten off to an excellent start, with more than 10 million subscribers signing up since its launch on November 12.
The huge number of subscribers appears to have caught Disney by surprise. The company reportedly only anticipated around a third of that number, and consequently many subscribers complained they were having issues signing up to, and logging into the service, as Disney's servers were overwhelmed, Yahoo Finance reported.
Even so, the company couldn’t hide its delight at the astonishing uptake of its new service.
“Disney+, the highly anticipated streaming service from The Walt Disney Company, has already reached a major milestone, achieving a remarkable 10 million sign-ups since launching," the company said in a November 13 announcement.
The company’s excitement is perhaps understandable, as Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger has previously referred to Disney+ as "the most important product our company has launched in a long time, certainly in my tenure".
The numbers are all the more impressive considering that Disney+ still isn’t available in most countries. It launched this week in the USA, Canada and the Netherlands, and will expand next week to include Australia and New Zealand. But the rest of the world will have to wait until next year.
For U.K. viewers, as well as those in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and “other countries” in Western Europe, they’ll have to wait until March 31 for the service to come available.
Disney+ will then roll out in Eastern Europe and Latin America in late 2020, with the company saying the service should be available in most of the world within two years.
One thing that isn’t clear is how many of Disney+’s 10 million subscribers will actually end up paying for the service. That’s because the company is currently offering it as a free trial, with subscriptions priced at $7 in the U.S. once the free period ends.
Still, Disney is confident that many of those users will be prepared to stump up the readies to continue watching. The company predicts it will have between 60 million to 90 million subscribers worldwide by 2024. Of course, that would still leave it some distance behind its main rival Netflix, which had 158 million subscribers at the end of September 2019.
