Disney+ reached its 5-year subscriber goal in only 9 months

By Sam Barsanti | August 6, 2020 | 7:56pm

Aux Features Film

Disney+ reached its 5-year subscriber goal in only 9 months

You watching Disney+ Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto

At the risk of bullying Quibi unnecessarily: Not every new streaming service has been having trouble getting new subscribers to stick around. According to The Playlist, Disney+ is not only not having trouble, it has actually already met a five-year goal that the company set out to reach when the service launched. That came out during an investors call with newish Disney CEO Bob Chapek, who explained that Disney+ currently has just over 60 million subscribers, hitting the bottom end of a 60-90 million subscriber goal that they had wanted to reach by 2024. That’s relatively impressive (The Playlist notes that Netflix has 200 million, so it probably thinks this number is cute), but it’s worth noting that there are a lot of external factors that nobody could’ve predicted when that goal was established.

For one thing, there’s been this whole global pandemic going on that has forced people to stay in their homes for a long time, increasing the demand for (non-Quibi) streaming content. Also, because of that global pandemic, Disney+ became the home of Hamilton, which was supposed to get a theatrical run before all of this bullshit happened. That was surely a boon to Disney+, even if that pandemic also delayed plans for some of its other original (we still don’t have any of those Marvel shows). It’s probably safe to assume that Disney+ will just get bigger from here, but it might also be hard for it to maintain this kind of pace. Really, other than Marvel fans who don’t care about The Simpsons or Star Wars, who would sign up for Disney+ now that hasn’t signed up for it already? Young people who have just left home and are getting off their parents’ streaming plans? Is that a thing?

Actually, now we’re worried that this skepticism is going to convince Disney to start buying up more media companies, which doesn’t really need to happen. So yeah, Disney+ will keep getting 60,000 new users every year forever! No need for any further action, Mickey!

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