It was a magical day for Disney yesterday. Disney+ launched yesterday to great fanfare & it looks like many of us jumped on board.
Disney revealed today that Disney+ had already garnered 10 million signups. This is a number that likely explains why the service experienced outages yesterday when users tried to log-in or sign-up. The glitches, which the company attributed to unexpectedly high interest that overloaded its technological infrastructure, diminished over the course of the day.
10 million signups does not equal 10 million subscribers but Disney+ is already one of the most popular streaming services in North America. It points Disney toward the high end of its own projections for 60 million-90 million subscribers globally by 2024. (Netflix at last report has about 162 million global subscribers, with 60 million in the U.S.)
Other stats released today, courtesy of Apptopia, is that they estimate that 3.2 million downloads occurred of the Disney+ app on iOS and Android. The numbers on all of this gets a bit tricky because Disney+ is also available for free for the first year to most Verizon wireless subscribers in the U.S. It can also be accessed via Samsung smart TVs, Roku and Amazon Fire TV as well as Disney’s own website. There is also the factor of the Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+ bundle. Disney has not shed any light yet on how many of the 10 million sign-ups may have opted for the bundle.
Disney+ is about to follow suit with their streaming competition by not revealing any streaming data, at least for a while. “Moving forward, there are no plans to release Disney+ subscriber data outside of The Walt Disney Company’s quarterly earnings calls.”, said the company.
